Hear more from co-author @jiachenyan.bsky.social:

New research led by Faculty Affiliate @mbernst.bsky.social, former Postdoctoral Fellow @jiachenyan.bsky.social, and fellow scholars sheds light on the role of social media algorithms in driving political polarization and outlines new paths forward for both social media users and researchers.

🚨 New in Nature+Science!🚨 AI chatbots can shift voter attitudes on candidates & policies, often by 10+pp 🔹Exps in US Canada Poland & UK 🔹More “facts”→more persuasion (not psych tricks) 🔹Increasing persuasiveness reduces "fact" accuracy 🔹Right-leaning bots=more inaccurate

What if you could see fewer hostile political posts on social media? A new paper out in Science by Martin Saveski @msaveski.bsky.social of the iSchool, along with @tiziano.bsky.social, @jiachenyan.bsky.social, Jeff Hancock, Jeanne Tsai and @mbernst.bsky.social, explores this: doi.org/10.1126/scie...

CSCW folks, I wanted to highlight how excited and proud I am to see work from our community (dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/..., CSCW '24 best paper winner led by @jiachenyan.bsky.social and @mlam.bsky.social) grow and expand ambition into this Science paper. CSCW has a ton to offer the world.

Our new study in @science.org built an LLM-powered browser extension to rerank social media feeds without requiring platform cooperation. In a preregistered 10-day field experiment (N=1,256), we found that algorithmic ranking can both raise and lower levels of affective political polarization.

A novel new study finds you can reduce polarization on X simply with a simple change to the algorithm. I spoke with the researchers: www.platformer.news/stanford-pol...

New paper in Science: In a platform-independent field experiment, we show that reranking content expressing antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity in social media feeds alters affective polarization. 🧵

Joint work with @tiziano.bsky.social, @jiachenyan.bsky.social, Jeff Hancock, Jeanne Tsai, @mbernst.bsky.social Link: doi.org/10.1126/scie... And a very thoughtful perspective by @jennyallen.bsky.social and @jatucker.bsky.social: doi.org/10.1126/scie... /1

Article with @tiziano.bsky.social, @msaveski.bsky.social, @jiachenyan.bsky.social, Jeff Hancock, and Jeanne Tsai www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Our new article in @science.org enables social media reranking outside of platforms' walled gardens. We add an LLM-powered reranking of highly polarizing political content into N=1256 participants' feeds. Downranking cools tensions with the opposite party—but upranking inflames them.

Realtime LLM social media reranking enables field experiments demonstrating how we can depolarize. Congratulations @tiziano.bsky.social, @msaveski.bsky.social, and @jiachenyan.bsky.social!