Conceitos essenciais
Enhancing news engagement through bot interventions on social media platforms.
Resumo
The content discusses a study focusing on incentivizing news consumption on social media platforms using large language models and realistic bot accounts. The study aims to enhance users' exposure to verified and ideologically balanced news in an ecologically valid setting. It includes a detailed field experiment conducted on Twitter users, analyzing the effects of bots responding with news-related content. The results show limited but promising effects, especially among politically interested users.
Directory:
- Introduction
- Polarization, declining trust, and wavering support for democratic norms are pressing threats to the U.S.
- Data Extraction
- Identified U.S.-based Twitter users actively tweeting about sports, entertainment, or lifestyle.
- Results
- Describes pre-treatment user metrics and treatment effects based on gender of bots and user political interest.
- Discussion
- Highlights implications for research, platforms, and democracy regarding news engagement on social media.
Estatísticas
We rely on a large-scale two-week long field experiment (from 1/19/2023 to 2/3/2023) on 28,457 Twitter users.
Users followed more news accounts after the intervention.
Female bot treatment group liked significantly more content from news media accounts compared to the control group.
Citações
"We argue that the problem is less that people consume bad political information but that most people do not consume any at all."
"Exposure to verified and ideologically balanced quality news creates an informed and efficacious public."
"News makes up only 1.4% of Facebook’s News Feed."