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Longer-Term Cumulative Effects of Increased News Following and Liking

Investigate whether small increases in following and liking posts from ideologically balanced news organizations on Twitter—prompted by GPT-2–based bot replies—lead over time to cumulative outcomes such as higher political knowledge and efficacy, greater engagement with public affairs content, and expanded consumption of quality news, which were not testable within the study’s time frame.

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Background

The authors note that even small changes in following and liking news content could accumulate by increasing exposure to quality news in users’ feeds and by signaling interest to platform algorithms, potentially yielding more recommendations of public affairs content. They emphasize these downstream effects might be meaningful but were beyond the scope of their two-week design.

They explicitly state that these potential cumulative effects could not be tested in their project and call for longer designs measuring additional behavioral and self-reported variables.

References

These subtle and potentially cumulative effects cannot be tested in this project, and so we invite future work to examine them using longer designs that capture additional variables, both behavioral and self-reported.

— Incentivizing News Consumption on Social Media Platforms Using Large Language Models and Realistic Bot Accounts (2403.13362 - Askari et al., 20 Mar 2024) in Discussion