Ranking messages on social media platforms

Well, someone obviously must understand how the algorithms work otherwise they couldn't have implemented it. I actually don't think the algorithms are that complicated and have been thinking about writing a toy simulation to demonstrate how reinforcement learning can be used to re-order the sequence of interactions in a social media sandbox in order to keep users engaged for as long as possible.

I just wanted to know if there was prior work on this that I could use before I went ahead and did the work because if someone has already done this then it would save me a lot of hassle. But it doesn't look like the question will get an answer on cs.stackexchange so I'll probably have to do the work myself.