It’s probably impossible to fix social media, new research shows

Social media is a familiar scapegoat for anything wrong with modern society. But according to a new preprint study, it's not the fault of engagement-driven algorithms, feeds that aren’t chronological, the presence of likes/reposts, or even our tendency to seek out negativity.

Instead, certain negative aspects appear to be a fundamental part of social media as we know it, with many of the proposed fixes to these root issues failing to actually reduce its toxicity.

Let’s break it down

The study examined what the authors identified as the three worst aspects of social media: the development of partisan echo chambers, how a small group of elite users have outsized influence (attention inequality), and how the most extreme or divisive voices are consistently amplified.

To try and solve these problems, researchers created AI personas to simulate online social media behavior, then tested several intervention strategies proposed by social scientists:

1. Switching to strictly time-based or randomized feeds
2. Inverting the algorithms that optimize engagement so that sensational content is less visible
3. Boosting users’ exposure to a diversity of viewpoints and opposing political views
4. Using "bridging algorithms" that promote content aimed at mutual understanding, rather than emotional provocation
5. Hiding social statistics—like reposts and follower accounts—to reduce influence cues
6. Removing biographies so that users’ identity and views aren’t readily available

None of the fixes worked

While a handful of changes showed modest improvements, none were able to fully prevent the worst aspects of social media. And in many cases, interventions that improved one area led to losses in others.

• Switching to strictly time-based social media feeds performed best at reducing the issue of attention inequality, but also made the amplification of extreme content even worse.
• Bridging algorithms showed modest improvement in breaking up political echo chambers, however, they also increased attention inequality.

The study concludes that social media’s negative outcomes appear to be an inherent feature of social networks where the probability of connecting to someone depends on how many previous connections that person has.

But…The problem may not stick around for long, according to Petter Törnberg, one of the study’s authors. He recently told ArsTechnica that social media is reaching a “crisis point” with the rise of mass-produced AI content that seeks to maximize attention, and predicts that conventional social networks likely won’t survive this AI onslaught.

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