Social‑media feeds are detoxified by a redesigned algorithm

A large-scale experiment tested the impact of changing the Bluesky feed-ranking algorithm on political content and perceptions during the 2024 US presidential election. By making feeds more representative of users, the ‘diversified extremity’ algorithm reduced exposure to polarizing content and made perceptions of social norms more accurate, without reducing user enjoyment. Reverse-chronological and ‘diversified extremity’ feeds result in less uncivil content than the current engagement-based model.