Twenty years after Facebook spread across college campuses, its effects on society remain heavily studied and poorly understood. Little consensus exists over whether it promotes or degrades mental health, heals divides or polarizes, alters electoral outcomes or foments extremism. Repeated failure to reach scientific consensus about its effects—much less identify workable, scalable and effective solutions—suggests a deeper suite of problems.

First, scientific approaches to understanding social media’s impacts rarely take into account complexity: causes and effects span time and organizational complexity. Second, failing to account for these features can undermine and bias causal estimates from “gold standard” tools of science readily deployed elsewhere, leading to ostensibly large effects appearing to evaporate on experimental investigation.

Finally, industry funding has been a major component of the field since its inception, which can disrupt consensus formation even in a field composed of entirely earnest researchers whose integrity cannot be bought. Moving from era in which social media is a driving economic force into one replete with a menagerie of artificial intelligences will require science learning from past failures and recalibrating to meet the challenges ahead.

Bio:

Joe Bak-Coleman is a collective behavior scientist at the University of Washington and an applied external fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. He earned his Ph.D. at Princeton University and went on to complete postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Washington and the Columbia School of Journalism. His research explores how the flow of information through groups impacts their ability to make decisions amidst uncertainty. Leveraging mathematical theory, statistical analysis, and experimental methods, he has studied collective behavior across diverse contexts; from zebra herds and fish schools to social media users and in scientific communities. In addition to his academic research, he has served as a consulting expert for the United Nations and has a forthcoming book, Of Fish and Fascists, due out in early 2027. His research and writing has appeared in Nature, PNAS, Science Advances, Wired, and Scientific American.

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