Why have social media platforms become so polarised? And, can they ever be fixed? These two questions are at the heart of a novel experiment at the University of Amsterdam.

The researchers simulated a social media platform, populated it entirely with AI chatbots and then kept tweaking it to see what happened. Sadly, their findings offered little suggestion that the networks on which we spend so much time scrolling will become more pleasant anytime soon.

'Dysfunctional effects'

To see if they could prevent their simulated platform from "turning into a polarised hellscape", the experts tried "six specific intervention strategies", said Futurism . These included "switching to chronological news feeds, boosting diverse viewpoints, hiding social statistics like follower counts, and remov

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