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Last fall, they featured an extensive interview with Petter Törnberg of the University of Amsterdam, who studies the underlying mechanisms of social media that give rise to its worst aspects: the partisan echo chambers, the concentration of influence among a small group of elite users (attention inequality), and the amplification of the most extreme divisive voices.
Key facts
For his second new paper, published in the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media (JQD:DM), Törnberg relied on nationally representative data from the 2020 and 2024 American National
In that case, “The engagement behavior was a 72 percentage point shift to the right, which is insane,” said Törnberg
Conversely, if 10 percent of users in a given social media community largely agree with your stances, you will be more tolerant toward diverse opinions that contradict your own
There’s a certain chance that some users will end up in communities where it’s homogenous and 99 percent of users are disagreeing with them,” said Törnberg
Summary
Törnberg’s research showed that, while numerous platform-level intervention strategies have been proposed to combat these issues, none are likely to be effective. Törnberg has been busy since then, producing two new papers and one new preprint building on this realization that social media is structured differently than the physical world, with unexpected downstream consequences. Those simulated users were randomly programmed to either hold an opinion or its opposite and then interact randomly with selected members of a simulated online community. Consistent with last year’s results, echo chambers emerge naturally from the basic architecture of social media platforms.