Profit motivation of social media companies may compel them to inject bias and create polarization, study finds

LAWRENCE — Social media companies thrive on the subtle influencing of users’ behavior. Nudging, so to speak.

“It is of interest to social media companies to nudge users in such a way that their engagement level increases, but as a result, echo chambers are created and the level of polarization increases,” said Debabrata Dey, the Davis Area Director of Analytics, Information, and Operations and the Ronald G. Harper Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Information Systems at the University of Kansas.

“In this study, we create a robust, quantitative framework of how the echo chambers are created because of a platform’s nudging strategy.”

For his new study titled “Polarization or Bias: Take Your Click on Social Media,” Dey set up a microeconomic model to study whether a platform’s profit motivation compels it to adopt a user-targeting strategy that injects bias and creates polarization. His research also finds that if a policymaker tries to crack down on polarization, it could end up making the platform switch to bias instead. 

The research appears in the Journal of the Association for Information Systems. 

“The biggest surprise we found is that polarization and bias act as substitutes toward the platform’s profit,” said Dey, who co-wrote the paper with Atanu Lahiri of the University of Texas at Dallas and Rajiv Mukherjee of Texas A&M.

“If you nudge everybody to one side and nobody to the other side, then that reduces polarization because you don’t have conflict. However, because there is only one side, the nudging strategy then becomes completely biased.”

According to the study, polarization occurs when users get split along their pro-attitudinal narratives and start doubting the legitimacy of counter-attitudinal ones. Bias occurs when a platform’s user-targeting strategy starts favoring one narrative over its alternative. This opens the door to misinformation and half-truths to propagate through the network of users.

“For the social media platform, it can generate more money using either polarization or bias, and typically their first choice is going to be polarization. But if you want to cut down on polarization, and if you put some penalty on the level of polarization that the social media platform creates, it will then shift to bias to get that extra profit,” he said.

Dey’s paper states that recent estimates indicate about 4.8 billion people around the world make regular use of social media platforms, spending each day an average of over two hours on social media activities. While researching this topic, his team found several field studies looking at polarization within platforms. But at a macro level, they didn’t address the issue of incentives.

“Since economics is a subject of incentives, we thought that an economic tool will be useful in understanding if there is any motivation or not. If there is, then people might work on those motivations … but let’s first try to see if there are any motivations,” he said.

Ideally, a social media platform should not have any bias, Dey notes. It should expose its users to both sides of a narrative. But this being a normative study, Dey doesn’t speculate whether the polarization/bias approach is actually good or bad. And neither does he speculate whether social media platforms are acting on these economic incentives.

“Chances are they would, but we don’t take a stand on that,” he said. “Our stand is that there is ample incentive for social media companies to behave in a manner others are alleging how they behave.”

A KU faculty member since 2022, Dey specializes in artificial intelligence and information systems. He has also recently focused on issues related to public policy.

Dey believes CEOs of social media platforms could use this research to address concerns users might have about the manipulation inherent in the medium.

“Optics are very important for social media companies,” Dey said. “Even if you have incentives to be polarizing or biased, you don’t want people to know about it. You don’t want people to get really frustrated with a platform that they have adopted already and leave and go to another one.”