Scientists Created an Entire Social Network Where Every User Is a Bot, and Something Wild Happened

Researchers at the University of Amsterdam simulated a social media platform populated entirely by GPT-4o chatbots and tested six intervention strategies—including chronological feeds, diverse viewpoint promotion, and hiding follower counts—to prevent polarization, but none significantly reduced echo chambers and some actually worsened the situation by floating extreme content to the top. The study reveals that polarization stems not just from toxic content itself but from how such content shapes network structures and creates extreme attention inequality, a problem that could intensify as AI-generated content optimized for engagement increasingly dominates conventional social media platforms.

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