Study: Social media probably can’t be fixed
Study: Social media probably can’t be fixed

arstechnica.com
Study: Social media probably can’t be fixed

“The [structural] mechanism producing these problematic outcomes is really robust and hard to resolve.”…
I don’t really understand how the research design leads to the author’s conclusions. For example they state they created the AI personas based off of the american national election survey but go on to make comments about global internet behavior. With that data it seems like they should only suggest the model as an attempt at approximating the behavior american voters. If someone takes the time to read the actual arxiv paper I’d be curious to know if the methodology is more robust than this article implies. Feels a bit like they designed opposing archetypes based on us political surveys then tried to say interventions in social media design (re-organizing feeds, hiding likes, etc) wouldn’t help generally.
Yup, that is problematic. An AI persona is not going to change their behavior when the social media environment it's ingesting changes.
Even so, I found it very thought-provoking. The discussion towards the end of the article about how uneven power distribution happens as a result of people following each other makes a lot of sense. Reddit/Lemmy style social media doesn't have this dynamic but the group-think enforced by voting is pretty double-edged.