[ExI] Even social media with only AI users becomes dysfunctional

[BillK]

We're doomed.
Study: Social media probably can’t be fixed.
"The [structural] mechanism producing these problematic outcomes is
really robust and hard to resolve."
Jennifer Ouellette – 13 Aug 2025

<https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/08/study-social-media-probably-cant-be-fixed/>
Quotes:
It's no secret that much of social media has become profoundly
dysfunctional. Rather than bringing us together into one utopian
public square and fostering a healthy exchange of ideas, these
platforms too often create filter bubbles or echo chambers. A small
number of high-profile users garner the lion's share of attention and
influence, and the algorithms designed to maximize engagement end up
merely amplifying outrage and conflict, ensuring the dominance of the
loudest and most extreme users—thereby increasing polarization even
more.

Co-authors Petter Törnberg and Maik Larooij of the University of
Amsterdam wanted to learn more about the mechanisms that give rise to
the worst aspects of social media: the partisan echo chambers, the
concentration of influence among a small group of elite users
(attention inequality), and the amplification of the most extreme
divisive voices. So they combined standard agent-based modeling with
large language models (LLMs), essentially creating little AI personas
to simulate online social media behavior. "What we found is that we
didn't need to put any algorithms in, we didn't need to massage the
model," Törnberg told Ars. "It just came out of the baseline model,
all of these dynamics."
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It's dysfunctional by design - because outrage gets clicks.
BillK