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no bull and the aftermath. It exposes the complexity of policy solutions that dictate how algorithms

have to operate. It's just not so simple in terms of one switch to an algorithm has all these

changes in terms of what content is surfaced and what people see on the platforms. I'm Quinted

Jurassic, a senior editor at LawFair, and this is the LawFair podcast, September 11th, 2023.

Today we're bringing you an episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the information ecosystem.

How much influence do social media platforms have on American politics and society? It's a

tough question for researchers to answer, not just because it's so big, but also because

platforms rarely if ever provide all the data that would be needed to address the problem.

A new batch of papers released in the journal Science and Nature marks the latest attempt

to tackle this question, with access to data provided by Facebook's parent company Meta.

The 2020 Facebook and Instagram election research study, a partnership between Meta researchers

and outside academics, studied the platform's impact on the 2020 election, and uncovered

some nuanced findings, suggesting that those impacts might be less than you'd expect.

Today on the podcast, my fellow LawFair senior editor, Ellen Rosenstein and I, are joined

by the project's co-leaders, Talia Stroud, of the University of Texas at Austin, and

Joshua A. Tucker of NYU. We discussed their findings, what it was like to work with Meta,

and whether or not this is a good model for independent academic research on platforms

going forward. If you're interested in more on the project, we'll also provide links to

the papers, an overview of the findings, and an FAQ provided by Tucker and Stroud in

...