Science Editors Raise New Doubts on Meta's Claims It Isn't Polarizing (msn.com) 16
Meta Platforms' claims that Facebook doesn't polarize Americans came under new doubt as the journal Science raised questions about a prominent research paper the tech giant has cited to support its position. WSJ: In an editorial Thursday, Science said that Meta's emergency efforts to calm its platforms in the wake of the 2020 election may have swayed the conclusions of the paper, which the journal published in July 2023. The editorial, titled "Context matters in social media," was prompted by a letter that Science also published presenting new criticism of the paper. Because the study of Facebook's algorithms relied on data provided by Meta when it was undertaking extraordinary efforts to restrain incendiary political content, the letter's authors argue that the paper may have overstated the case that social media algorithms didn't contribute to political polarization.
Such criticisms of peer-reviewed research often appear below papers in academic journals, but Science's editors felt their editorial was needed to more prominently caveat this original paper's conclusions, said Holden Thorp, Science's editor in chief. "It was incumbent on us to come up with a way somehow that people who would come to the paper would know of these concerns,â Thorp said in an interview. While no correction was warranted, he said, "There's an election coming up, and we care about people citing this paper." Meta said it had been transparent with researchers about its actions during the time of the study, and the company and its research partners say it had no control over the Science paper's conclusions. Meta called debates of the sort aired on Thursday as part of the research process.
Such criticisms of peer-reviewed research often appear below papers in academic journals, but Science's editors felt their editorial was needed to more prominently caveat this original paper's conclusions, said Holden Thorp, Science's editor in chief. "It was incumbent on us to come up with a way somehow that people who would come to the paper would know of these concerns,â Thorp said in an interview. While no correction was warranted, he said, "There's an election coming up, and we care about people citing this paper." Meta said it had been transparent with researchers about its actions during the time of the study, and the company and its research partners say it had no control over the Science paper's conclusions. Meta called debates of the sort aired on Thursday as part of the research process.
Science should look closer to home (Score:5, Interesting)
Science, the academic journal, should look closer to home like a polarizing agenda based research done for 50 years in Social Science journals.
From Wikipedia - Grievance Studies Affair - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The grievance studies affair was the project of a team of three authors—Peter Boghossian, James A. Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose—to highlight what they saw as poor scholarship and erosion of standards in several academic fields. Taking place over 2017 and 2018, their project entailed submitting bogus papers to academic journals on topics from the field of critical social theory such as cultural, queer, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies to determine whether they would pass through peer review and be accepted for publication. Several of these papers were subsequently published, which the authors cited in support of their contention.[1]
The affair echoed Alan Sokal's 1996 hoax in Social Text, a cultural studies journal, which inspired Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose.
The trio set out with the intent to expose problems in what they called "grievance studies", referring to academic areas where they claim "a culture has developed in which only certain conclusions are allowed... and put social grievances ahead of objective truth".[2][3][4] As such, the trio, identifying themselves as leftists and liberals, described their project as an attempt to raise awareness of what they believed was the damage that postmodernism and identity politics-based scholarship was having on leftist political projects as well as on science and academia more broadly.
Software is malleable (Score:2)
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Is Facebook creating the polarization?
Or is it just profiting by providing narrow forums to take advantage of preexisting polarization?
Polls show that views haven't changed that much. For instance, there has always been strong opposition to immigration. It's just become more of a partisan issue compared to 20 years ago, when GWB advocated moderate immigration reform. Few Republican politicians would do that today. Same with abortion. There used to be pro-life Democrats and pro-choice Republicans. That's les
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Things have also become simplistic. Decades of claiming that issues are complicated have upset the low information voters who just want a big wall that is easily climbable. Not necessarily new either, the disgraced conservative congressman (who claimed he's the inspiration for top gun) put on the shocked and amazed face that they were putting up a double wall on the border near San Diego when clearly every moron knows it should be a triple wall. The shaving blades theory of walls. Ie, always ratchet up th
Which disgraced conservative congressman? (Score:3)
There are more than one disgraced conservative congressmen to go around, but there is only one I know about with some connection to Top Gun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
He was certainly disgraced inasmuch as he was convicted of a felony in accepting bribes from a defense contractor while serving in Congress. He was later pardoned by a US president who is not all that popular with many on Slashdot.
Top Gun was not only a Hollywood movie and its sequel, Top Gun is also the U.S. States Navy Fighter
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Cunningham was quite rightly a war hero, credit where it should be. However Cunningham as a politician was definitely the guy trying to push the envelope of divisive or polarizing politics. Even though he was certainly in a solidly conservative district where he was nearly a shoo in for re-elections. Or maybe I just remember more of the over-the-top statements he made.
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It appears from the Wikipedia article that Cunningham was trying to push the envelope of not just his F4 Phantom aircraft by calling attention to himself in many ways, of which polarizing politics was just the least of it.
If as a society we recruit someone to strap themselves into a jet, fly over Vietnam and dodge missiles and adversary aircraft, I think you would end up with a guy who if not completely crazy certainly has a high opinion of himself.
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Polarization is related with negative views (of the other party; of the party in power). One can construct different definitions of a Political Polarization Index and monitor it along time.
* Europe, 2022: "Measuring partisan polarization with partisan differences in satisfaction with the government: the introduction of a new comparative approach" https://link.springer.com/arti... [springer.com] (open access)
* USA, 2023: "The 2023 Polarization Index - A Holistic Analysis of the State of U.S. Political Strife" https://www.p [pellcenter.org]
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Extreme views tend to generate more reaction, which helps maximize engagement. This is the cancer of the ad-based internet, where eyeballs equal money and the worth of the content doesn't matter.
Tl;Dr (Score:2)
The post you are responding not making sense (Score:2)
The point of that post, exactly.
Political Polarization (Score:2)
First of all, 200,000 or so people out of 240+ million is a insanely small subset, with no mention of geographic locations or ties to election results for their counties. A real report should include something like 24 million people and have the computational resources to compute the results, or maybe run it across all 240 million people without a survey based on their likes.
Two, it doesn't say, s