Nearly three years ago Meta announced it was partnering with more than a dozen independent researchers to study the impact Facebook and Instagram had on the 2020 election. Both Meta and the researchers promised the project, which would rely on troves of internal data, would deliver an independent look at issues like polarization and misinformation.
Now, we have the first results of that research in the form of four peer-reviewed papers published in the journals Science and Nature. The studies offer an intriguing new look at how Facebook and Instagram’s algorithms affected what users saw in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.