Social media has become an inseparable part of our lives. It is estimated that in 2020, the average user spent over two hours each day on social media. Think of your habits: do you browse Facebook (which has over 2.5 billion active users), Instagram, YouTube or WhatsApp every day, and how often?

While social media connects people, it brings with it many problems— particularly during political elections and pandemics—among them the spread of misinformation, and polarisation. The former references false or inaccurate information, while the latter occurs as a result of algorithms used by social media platforms, which frequently feed us with the content we favour, thus exposing us to a limited range of viewpoints.

As part of the effort to look into such worrisome phenomena, Dr SHEN Fei (Principal Investigator) and Dr Tetsuro KOBAYASHI (Co-investigator) of CityU’s Department of Media and Communication are currently working on a project titled “Can third party fact-checkers on Facebook reduce affective polarisation?” after it was selected as one of the awardees in Facebook’s Request for Proposals (RFP) on misinformation and polarisation in August last year.

In this project, among the 25 selected from over 1,000 submissions from 600 institutions and 77 countries around the world, the researchers intend to explore the influence of fact-checking on attitude (de)polarisation in Hong Kong.

For this round of RFP, the social media giant offered US$2 million in funding to support research that will enrich the understanding of challenges related to misinformation, polarisation, information quality, and conflict on social media and social technology platforms. It hopes that these studies can contribute to a shared understanding across the broader industry about how social technology companies can better address social issues on their platforms.

Shen and Kobayashi, along with other awardees, are conducting their investigations across 42 countries on all continents except Antarctica. Apart from the subject of polarisation, they are also examining issues such as digital literacy in developing countries, trust and bias on social media, fake news, among other topics.