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podcasts. Facebook parent Metta has gotten flack for its role in serving up election misinformation.

But how much can we really blame the Algo? From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Lily Jamali.

Almost three years later, the 2020 presidential election is hardly in the rear-view mirror.

Big questions remain about how algorithms help spread polarizing content on the social media platforms

that so many Americans turn to. For answers, academics across the country have been collaborating

with Metta, which runs Facebook and Instagram. The results, four studies published recently

that look at online polarization and ideological segregation among users on both platforms over

three months during the 2020 election. NYU's Joshua Tucker is one of the academics who worked on

these reports. He walked me through what he considers to be the top three findings.

Algorithms are extremely influential in terms of what people see. The second is that we find that

there is significant ideological segregation, so we find political news that's primarily read by

liberals and we find lots of political news that's primarily or exclusively read by conservatives.

The third big picture finding, though, is that despite these two facts, we find that changing

aspects of people's platform experiences, and these are kind of big aspects of the platform

experience that have been positive to have a big impact on political attitudes, things like

reducing exposure to virality by not having people exposed to reshared content,

things like reducing echo chambers by having people be exposed to less content from

...