For a long time, we have recognized the new challenges that social media brings to our lives. Among them, the concept of the echo chamber, proposed by Professor Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School, has been widely spread in the Chinese world. As we w

Today, social media has been deeply integrated into people's daily lives. When individuals are faced with an explosion of information in the real world, filtering and organizing information seem to be an inevitable choice. In response to the challeng

Living with a vigilant attitude is certainly good, yet there is still a lack of clear research on the specific manifestation of the echo chamber in reality. We lack empirical evidence on the existence of the echo chamber and how it affects individual

In many discussions about the filter bubble, people assume that exposure to diverse information can break out of it. However, in his book Breaking the Social Media Prism, Chris Bail, a sociologist at Duke University, raises a question: if individuals

In his book, Bell mentioned a person who likes to vent his emotions online and attract everyone's attention. I think we are all familiar with portraits like this, and their purpose is not to express or seek consensus, but to create chaos. When faced

Recently, Petter Törnberg and Maik Larooij from the University of Amsterdam published a paper on the physics preprint platform arXiv, which gained attention from the Science magazine. In their paper titled Can We Fix Social Media? Testing Prosocial I

In three separate experiments, researchers used three popular large language models (LLMs) - ChatGPT, Llama, and DeepSeek - to expand virtual users into detailed personal profiles that included interests, hobbies, and occupations, and made decisions

In every experiment, the virtual social network ran for 10,000 cycles. However, regardless of which LLM model researchers used, the platform inevitably exhibited three typical negative phenomena: echo chamber effect, concentration of influence, and a

The study subsequently tested six intervention strategies commonly used to alleviate social media algorithm problems in idealized forms:

Push in order of time or randomly

Downplay mainstream (highly shared) content

Balancing Party Content Bridge Algorithm

Priority in posting content with high empathy or high reasoning ability

Hide social media statistics, such as the number of followers

Hide personal profiles to reduce identity-based information transmission

However, the experimental results were disappointing. Only some interventions had a mild improvement on the system, but none could completely fix the polarized system. Actually, some interventions even exacerbated the problems. The bridging algorithm

Chronological push is an older push strategy that belongs to the Web 2.0 era. People tend to think that online communities sorted by time such as BBS forums are easier to achieve equality of attention and reduce division and polarization of the commu

In an interview with Ars Technica, Peter Tu00eber also mentioned his role as a scholar in criticizing and doubting AI simulation experiments in his research. However, at the same time, simply using observational data makes it difficult for researcher

In a previous study published in Nature magazine in 2021, a research team from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto analyzed 5.1 billion comments from the community platform Reddit over the past 14 years, as samples from mo

In the international academic community, research on the relationship between social media and political polarization often measures dimensions based on political orientations such as left and right wings. However, most empirical studies indicate tha

Perhaps, a more realistic explanation might be that the split within society itself determines the split of social media content. The opposing voices that people hear on social media are not algorithm-driven, but rather a true reflection of the divis

In fact, I recall the discussion of Richard Hofstadter, the author of The Anti-Intellectualism in American Tradition, who began to criticize the paranoid tradition of the politics in his era as early as in the 1960s. This is a kind of persistent psyc

References

[1] Larooij, M., & Törnberg, P. (2025). Can We Fix Social Media? Testing Prosocial Interventions using Generative Social Simulation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.03385.

[2] Waller, I., & Anderson, A. (2021). Quantifying social organization and political polarization in online platforms. Nature, 600(7888), 264-268.

This article comes from the WeChat public account Neural Reality (ID: neureality)