Gaël Le Mens

Jacopo D'Ignazi, Emma Fraxanet Morales, Andreas Kaltenbrunner et al.

Despite extensive research, the mechanisms through which online platforms shape extremism and polarization remain poorly understood. We identify and test a mechanism, grounded in empirical evidence, that explains how ranking algorithms can amplify both phenomena. This mechanism is based on well-documented assumptions: (i) users exhibit position bias and tend to prefer items displayed higher in the ranking, (ii) users prefer like-minded content, (iii) users with more extreme views are more likely to engage actively, and (iv) ranking algorithms are popularity-based, assigning higher positions to items that attract more clicks. Under these conditions, when platforms additionally reward \emph{active} engagement and implement \emph{personalized} rankings, users are inevitably driven toward more extremist and polarized news consumption. We formalize this mechanism in a dynamical model, which we evaluate by means of simulations and interactive experiments with hundreds of human participants, where the rankings are updated dynamically in response to user activity.

Gaël Le Mens, Aina Gallego

We use instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4, Llama 3, MiXtral, or Aya to position political texts within policy and ideological spaces. We ask an LLM where a tweet or a sentence of a political text stands on the focal dimension and take the average of the LLM responses to position political actors such as US Senators, or longer texts such as UK party manifestos or EU policy speeches given in 10 different languages. The correlations between the position estimates obtained with the best LLMs and benchmarks based on text coding by experts, crowdworkers, or roll call votes exceed .90. This approach is generally more accurate than the positions obtained with supervised classifiers trained on large amounts of research data. Using instruction-tuned LLMs to position texts in policy and ideological spaces is fast, cost-efficient, reliable, and reproducible (in the case of open LLMs) even if the texts are short and written in different languages. We conclude with cautionary notes about the need for empirical validation.

Fabrizio Germano, Vicenç Gómez, Gaël Le Mens

Ranking algorithms play a crucial role in online platforms ranging from search engines to recommender systems. In this paper, we identify a surprising consequence of popularity-based rankings: the fewer the items reporting a given signal, the higher the share of the overall traffic they collectively attract. This few-get-richer effect emerges in settings where there are few distinct classes of items (e.g., left-leaning news sources versus right-leaning news sources), and items are ranked based on their popularity. We demonstrate analytically that the few-get-richer effect emerges when people tend to click on top-ranked items and have heterogeneous preferences for the classes of items. Using simulations, we analyze how the strength of the effect changes with assumptions about the setting and human behavior. We also test our predictions experimentally in an online experiment with human participants. Our findings have important implications to understand the spread of misinformation.