Kleine Änderungen am „Für Sie“-Feed auf X können die politische Polarisierung schnell verstärken. Eine Studie zeigt, dass eine Woche politischer Inhalte einen Meinungswandel bewirken kann, der zuvor drei Jahre gedauert hätte
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/27/partisan-x-posts-increase-political-polarisation-among-users-social-media-research
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Small changes to the tone of posts fed to users of X can increase feelings of political polarisation as much in a week as would have historically taken at least three years, research has found.
A groundbreaking experiment to gauge the potency of Elon Musk’s social platform to increase political division found that when posts expressing anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity were boosted, even barely perceptibly, in the feeds of Democrat and Republican supporters there was a large change in their unfavourable feelings towards the other side.
The degree of increased division – known as “affective polarisation” – achieved in one week by the changes the academics made to X users’ feeds was as great as would have on average taken three years between 1978 and 2020.
Most of the more than 1,000 users who took part in the experiment during the 2024 US presidential election did not notice that the tone of their feed had been changed
The campaign was marked by divisive viral posts on X, including a fake image of Kamala Harris cosying up to Jeffrey Epstein at a gala and an AI-generated image posted by Musk of Kamala Harris dressed as a communist dictator that had 84m views.
Repeated exposure to posts expressing antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity “significantly influences” users’ feelings of polarisation and boosts sadness and anger, they found.
Musk bought Twitter in 2022, rebranded it X and introduced the “for you” feed, which instead of only showing posts relating to accounts users actively follow, uprates content calculated to maximise engagement.
The extent to which more antidemocratic posts make users feel greater animosity towards political opponents “demonstrates the power of the algorithm”, said Martin Saveski, assistant professor at the University of Washington information school, who, with colleagues at the universities of Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and Northeastern, produced the study published in the journal Science.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec7388
Which is exactly why no one should be on twitter
Normal people don’t use Twatter anymore.
Cambridge Analytica already turned this into a viable effective business model 10 years ago.
Everyone needs to just get off of all social media. Reddit included
Imagine if the FTC had HSR authority similar to HHS.
This is old research from 2024. Linking to a news article which cites another editorial.
This has no place near the word “science”
They’re using social media to manipulate humans? No way bro!
I highly recommend watching The Daily Show interview of Maria Ressa, Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist and author of the book “How to Stand Up to a Dictator“ because she discusses this subject.
If you jump to the 6:06 mark the next 15 seconds are eye opening and you can hear the real time reaction to what she is saying.
Which would be relevant if Twiter still itself was still relevant. Between bots and engagement slop, the site is basically an example of the Dead Internet theory.
If you’re still in Twitter you’re an idiot