A false claim recently went viral “and there wasn’t anything happening to stop it," one election official said

An interdisciplinary team of researchers led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst have published work in the journal Science calling into question the conclusions of a widely reported study—published in Science in 2023—finding the social platform's algorithms successfully filtered out untrustworthy news surrounding the 2020 election and were not major drivers of misinformation.

The researchers found that Meta introduced a temporary, and more rigorous, algorithm during part of the study period that filtered out more misinformation than the standard algorithm.

A new study led by researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst challenges the findings of a 2023 Meta-funded study, which suggested that Facebook’s algorithms effectively limited misinformation during the 2020 U.