{"id":70535,"date":"2025-08-16T05:27:21","date_gmt":"2025-08-16T05:27:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/70535\/"},"modified":"2025-08-16T05:27:21","modified_gmt":"2025-08-16T05:27:21","slug":"social-media-toxicity-cant-be-fixed-by-changing-the-algorithms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/70535\/","title":{"rendered":"Social media toxicity can’t be fixed by changing the algorithms"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Can social media\u2019s problems be solved?<\/p>\n

MoiraM \/ Alamy<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The polarising impact of social media isn\u2019t just the result of bad algorithms \u2013 it is inevitable because of the core components of how the platforms work, a study with AI-generated users has found. It suggests the problem won\u2019t be fixed unless we fundamentally reimagine the world of online communication.<\/p>\n

Petter T\u00f6rnberg<\/a> at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and his colleagues set up 500 AI chatbots designed to mimic a range of political beliefs in the US, based on the American National Election Studies Survey. Those bots, powered by the GPT-4o mini large language model, were then instructed to interact with one another on a simple social network the researchers had designed with no ads or algorithms.<\/p>\n

During five runs of the experiment, each involving 10,000 actions, the AI agents tended to follow people with whom they shared political affiliations, while those with more partisan views gained more followers and reposts. This echoed overall attention towards those users, which gravitated towards more partisan posters.<\/p>\n

In a previous study<\/a>, T\u00f6rnberg and his colleagues explored whether simulated social networks with different algorithms could identify routes to tamp down political polarisation \u2013 but the new research seems to contradict their earlier findings.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were expecting this [polarisation] to be something that\u2019s driven by algorithms,\u201d T\u00f6rnberg says. \u201c[We thought] that the platforms are designed for this \u2013 to produce these outcomes \u2013 because they are designed to maximise engagement and to piss you off and so on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead, they found it wasn\u2019t the algorithms themselves that seemed to be causing the issue, which could make any attempts to weed out antagonistic user behaviour by design very difficult. \u201cWe set up the simplest platform we could imagine, and then, boom, we already have these outcomes,\u201d he says. \u201cThat already suggests that this is stemming from something very fundamental to the fact that we have posting behaviour, reposting and following.\u201d<\/p>\n

To see whether those behaviours could be either muted or countered, the researchers also tested six potential solutions, including a solely chronological feed, giving less prominence to viral content, amplifying opposing views and empathetic and reasoned content, hiding follower and repost counts, and hiding profile bios.<\/p>\n

Most of the interventions made little difference: cross-party mixing changed by no more than about 6 per cent, and the share of attention hogged by top accounts shifted between 2 and 6 per cent \u2013 while others, such as hiding biographies of the users involved, actually made the problem worse. When there were gains in one area, they were countered by negative impacts elsewhere. Fixes that reduced user inequality made extreme posts more popular, while alterations to soften partisanship funnelled even more attention to a small elite.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost social media activities are always fruit of the poisonous tree \u2013 the beginning problems of social media always lie with their foundational design, and as such can encourage the worst of human behaviour,\u201d says Jess Maddox<\/a> at the University of Georgia.<\/p>\n

While T\u00f6rnberg acknowledges the experiment is a simulation that could simplify some mechanisms, he thinks it can tell us what social platforms need to do to reduce polarisation. \u201cWe might need more fundamental interventions and need more fundamental rethinking,\u201d he says. \u201cIt might not be enough to wiggle with algorithms and change the parameters of the platform, but [we might] need to rethink more fundamentally the structure of interaction and how these spaces structure our politics.\u201d<\/p>\n

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