RIP social media. What follows is confusing.

The fall is over, we pointed out great interview and Petter Törnberg of the University of Amsterdam, who studies the underlying mechanisms of social media that make it more difficult: disparate social media, increased influence among a small elite group (disparity of interest), and the development of highly divisive voices. He was not optimistic about the future of social media.

Tornberg’s research he showed itwhile many platform support methods have been proposed to deal with this problem, none of them seem to work. And it’s not the fault of the much-hated algorithms, untimely diets, or our human slowness in seeking out compromises. In fact, the forces behind all these negative effects are rooted in the structure of the media. So we’re going to be stuck in a perpetual pessimism unless someone hits a critical fix that can reverse the trend.

Törnberg has been very busy since then, creating two new papers and a new publishing house on the realization that human nature is created very differently from the world, with unexpected results. First of all new paperpublished in PLoS ONE, mainly on the echo chamber effect, using a similar approach to agents with large linguistic domains (LLMs) – essentially creating a small AI population to mimic social behavior online.

The simulated users were randomly assigned to have an idea or a variant of it and then randomly interacted with selected people in the Internet community. And if the number of community members who disagreed with the simulated users exceeded the given limit, the users were scheduled to leave and join another network.

Filter foam: Not the culprit, but the product

Consistent with last year’s results, it was found that echo chambers emerge naturally from the basic structure of social media. “The surprising thing we found is that we find echo chambers even without the filter foam, even though people tend to live in different places,” Törnberg said. “You don’t need an algorithmic hit. You can still find these highly separated areas. Another amazing thing is that the filter bubbles, which are said to make them uniform, can be healing.”