However… they also acknowledge that the study has limitations when it comes to measuring the real impact of a network like Facebook in democracies. According to David García, a professor at the University of Konstanz in Germany, the study’s findings are only able to experiment with individuals within a society where many others continue to use Facebook and Instagram normally.
This limitation makes it difficult to imagine a society without Facebook, compared to one with Facebook, and instead, is only able to compare individuals who do use the network to those who do not. EL PAÍS English provided detailed reporting on this topic… highlighting the significance of the findings and the potential implications for democracy.
The study’s authors hope that their research will contribute to a deeper understanding of the complex relationships between social media, “misinformation,” “and democracy.”
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The new article, published on Monday in the journal PNAS , is the work of more than 30 academics from U.S. universities and Meta researchers. It is part of the macro study, which began to be published last summer in the magazines Science and Nature. This research found that conservatives consume more misinformation on Facebook, among other results. The project is the result of an August 2020 agreement between Meta and two professors, who then selected the rest of the researchers.
Although the result is not completely clear, for Gentzkow, the finding is quite surprising: “Previous research has shown that exposure to misinformation is often quite low for most people, so I was really surprised to see this effect, which was large enough to be marginally detectable,” he says.
Aside from being part of an unprecedented macro study using internal Meta data, the work is also the largest ever done on social media deactivation. The sample is 10 times larger than any previous experiment, according to the article. The authors, however, admit that the work has its limitations when it comes to measuring the real impact of a network like Facebook in democracies.
“This study has the same problem as the previous ones,” says David García, a professor at the University of Konstanz in Germany, who commented on the summer 2023 articles in Nature . “It is only able to experiment with individuals who are within a society where many other people continue to use Facebook and Instagram normally. When we talk about the Facebook effect, we think about what society would be like without Facebook compared to what it is like with Facebook, not what the people who do not use the network are like compared to those who do use it,” García explains.
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