Social media toxicity can't be fixed by changing the algorithms

Can social media's problems be solved? The polarising impact of social media isn't just the result of bad algorithms – it is inevitable because of the core components of how the platforms work, a study with AI-generated users has found. It suggests the problem won't be fixed unless we fundamentally reimagine the world of online communication. Petter Törnberg at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and his colleagues set up 500 AI chatbots designed to mimic a range of political beliefs in the US, based on the American National Election Studies Survey. Those bots, powered by the GPT-4o mini large language model, were then instructed to interact with one another on a simple social network the researchers had designed with no ads or algorithms.