Author: Casey Newton
On Tuesday, The New York Times’ investigation of a study into how Facebook promoted anti-refugee violence in Germany galvanized discussion about how even normal political speech on the platform can drive users to extremes. On Wednesday, the report was criticized on the grounds that it may have unfairly linked correlation to causation, drawing more dramatic conclusions than can be supported by the evidence.
The case against the piece goes like this:
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On Tuesday, The New York Times’ investigation of a study into how Facebook promoted anti-refugee violence in Germany galvanized discussion about how even normal political speech on the platform can drive users to extremes. On Wednesday, the report was criticized on the grounds that it may have unfairly linked correlation to causation, drawing more dramatic conclusions than can be supported by the evidence.
The case against the piece goes like this:
- The study, which you can read here, has not been peer-reviewed.
- The study authors could not measure actual Facebook usage, which is private, so they relied on problematic proxies. Their proxy for average, non-ideological usage of Facebook was the Nutella Germany page, with 32 million...
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