Reranking Social Media Feeds: A Practical Guide for Field Experiments

TL;DR

This paper provides practical methods and open-source tools for conducting real-time reranking experiments on social media feeds using browser extensions, enabling naturalistic field studies without platform cooperation.

Contribution

It introduces a browser extension-based experimental method for reranking social media feeds and offers technical guidelines and open-source code for minimal-delay implementation.

Findings

Demonstrated real-time reranking in naturalistic settings

Provided technical recommendations for minimal delay reranking

Released open-source code as a blueprint for future experiments

Abstract

Social media plays a central role in shaping public opinion and behavior, yet performing experiments on these platforms and, in particular, on feed algorithms is becoming increasingly challenging. This guide offers practical recommendations for researchers developing and deploying field experiments focused on real-time reranking of social media feeds. The article is organized around two contributions. First, we provide an overview of an experimental method using web browser extensions that intercepts and reranks content in real time, enabling naturalistic reranking field experiments. We then describe feed interventions and measurements that this paradigm enables on participants' actual feeds, without requiring the involvement of social media platforms. Second, we offer concrete technical recommendations for intercepting and reranking social media feeds with minimal user-facing delay, and provide an open-source implementation. This document aims to summarize lessons learned in running field experiments on social media, provide concrete implementation details, and foster the ecosystem of independent social media research. Finally, we release the source code that serves as a blueprint for implementing future feed-ranking experiments.