Metadata
- Author: Jennifer Ouellette
- Full Title:: Study: Social Media Probably Can’t Be Fixed
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- URL:: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/08/study-social-media-probably-cant-be-fixed/
- Read date:: 2025-08-14
Highlights
Simuladores de comportamiento entre personas!
something more of capturing human behavior in a more plausible way. We give them personas that we get from the American National Election Survey, which has very detailed questions about US voters and their hobbies and preferences. And then we turn that into a textual persona—your name is Bob, you’re from Massachusetts, and you like fishing—just to give them something to talk about and a little bit richer representation. And then they see the random news of the day, and they can choose to post the news, read posts from other users, repost them, or they can choose to follow users. If they choose to follow users, they look at their previous messages, look at their user profile. (View Highlight)
There’s a ton of interest in using LLMs for social simulation (View Highlight)
The kind of approach that we take in this paper is building on a tradition of complex systems thinking. We imagine very simple models of the human world and try to capture very fundamental mechanisms. (View Highlight)
You hit retweet when you see someone being angry about something, or doing something horrific, and then you share that. It’s well-known that this leads to toxic, more polarized content spreading more. But what we find is that it’s not just that this content spreads; it also shapes the network structures that are formed. So there’s feedback between the effective emotional action of choosing to retweet something and the network structure that emerges. And then in turn, you have a network structure that feeds back what content you see, resulting in a toxic network. The definition of an online social network is that you have this kind of posting, reposting, and following dynamics. It’s quite fundamental to it. That alone seems to be enough to drive these negative outcomes. (View Highlight)
attention draws attention, and this leads to a power law distribution, where 1 percent [of users] dominates the entire conversation. We know the conditions under which those power laws emerge. This is one of the main outcomes of social network dynamics: extreme inequality of attention. (View Highlight)
Those are the outcomes of having social networks where the probability of connecting to someone depends on how many previous connections they have. If we want to get rid of that, we probably have to move away from the social network model and have some kind of spatial model or group-based model that makes things a little bit more local, a little bit less globally interconnected. (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2025-08-14
They were talking about social interaction in a coffee house or a tea house, or reading groups and so on. People thought the Internet was going to be precisely that. It’s very much not that. The dynamics are fundamentally different because of those structural differences. We shouldn’t expect to be able to get a coffee house deliberation structure when we have a global social network where everyone is connected to everyone. It is difficult to imagine a functional politics building on that. (View Highlight)
Ars Technica: So let’s just blow up all the social media networks. It still won’t be better, but at least we’ll have different problems. Petter Törnberg: Exactly. We’ll find a new ditch. (View Highlight)