Epstein Z and Hause L. Yourfeed: Towards open science and interoperable systems for social media. arXiv.

Abstract

Existing social media platforms (SMPs) make it incredibly difficult for researchers to conduct studies on social media, which in turn has created a knowledge gap between academia and industry about the effects of platform design on user behavior. To close the gap, we introduce Yourfeed, a research tool for conducting ecologically valid social media research. We introduce the platform architecture, as well key opportunities such as assessing the effects of exposure of content on downstream beliefs and attitudes, measuring attentional exposure via dwell time, and evaluating heterogeneous newsfeed algorithms. We discuss the underlying philosophy of interoperability for social media and future developments for the platform.