Technology

The US 2020 Facebook and Instagram Election Study is a joint collaboration between a group of independent external academics from several institutions and Meta

Now we have the first results from this unusual collaboration, detailed in four separate papers—the first round of over a dozen studies stemming from the project.

"We also find that popular proposals to change social media algorithms did not sway political attitudes."

"In other words, pages and groups contribute much more to segregation than users,"

Finally, the vast majority of political news that Meta's third-party fact-checker program rated as false was viewed by conservatives, compared to liberals. That said, those false ratings amounted to a mere 0.2 percent, on average, of the full volume of content on Facebook. And political news in general accounts for just 3 percent of all posts shared on Facebook, so it's not even remotely the most popular type of content.

This last bit is key. This means (up to) 15% of popitical posts werr misinformation (some nonpolitical), mostly viewed by conservatives. They do not state which way this information leans.