For years, social media companies have faced pressure from users and government watchdogs to stop misinformation from distorting elections, deepening political divisions and undermining Americans’ trust in institutions.
But what if dramatically reducing people’s exposure to unreliable sources that frequently spread misinformation doesn’t actually change what they believe?
UC Berkeley Political Science Ph.D. student Olivier Bergeron-Boutin tested that question on Facebook and Instagram during the 2020 presidential election. In a new paper published in Science Advances, titled “Untrustworthy sources on Facebook and Instagram in 2020,” Bergeron-Boutin and his coauthors report findings from a large-scale study in which an independent group of academics partnered with researchers at Meta.
The researchers conducted an experiment among consenting Facebook and Instagram users that reduced social media feed exposure to content from sources that repeatedly spread misinformation.
The experiment was successful in changing what people saw: participants assigned to the intervention were exposed to roughly 70% less content from untrustworthy sources. However, their political beliefs and attitudes did not measurably change, even among those who were previously exposed to the most content from those sources.
