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Is Facebook Keeping You In a Political Bubble?

sciencehabit writes: Does Facebook make it harder for people with different political views to get along? Political scientists have long wondered whether the social network's news feed selectively serves up ideologically charged news while filtering out content from different camps. Now, a study by Facebook's in-house social scientists finds that this does happen, though the effect seems to be very small. "There's a growing concern that social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter allow us to more precisely engineer our informational environments than ever before, so we only get info that's consistent with our prior beliefs," says David Lazer, a political and computer scientist who authored a commentary on the paper.

11 of 179 comments (clear)

  1. Who gets their political news from Facebook? by H0p313ss · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yeah I know, the great unwashed.

    Sad world.

    --
    XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
    1. Re:Who gets their political news from Facebook? by readin · · Score: 4, Insightful

      But there are many many many people who use facebook regularly and the major players have to pander to them because the facebook viewers have a lot of votes.

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      I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
  2. Dude, my mom's on Woo Woo by xeno · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No, because I dropped Facebook a couple of years ago. Too narrow a view on the world, too much of a social/political/financial echo chamber, too prying re personal detail, too much advertising, and too much extremely-creepy influence on ads I see externally. I miss a *little* of the content, but most of it was OCD junk from distant relatives and bloviating nonsense from industry "thought leaders". Good riddance.

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    I think not...(*poof*)
    1. Re:Dude, my mom's on Woo Woo by antiperimetaparalogo · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Too narrow a view on the world, too much of a social/political/financial echo chamber, [...]

      Well, with all due respect (2667!) Sir... why are you in Slashdot?

      I understand that you may answer "for the same reason YOU are also" (by the way, my account is few days old -4091871!-... and i am right-wing, i.e., very far from Slashdot's own "political bubble" i think), but i (hopefully) i expect a (honest) criticism of Slashdot on the issues you raised about the other site - you owe it to us, "new kids of the block", old men (o.k., biologically i am old enough, most probably older than you...)

      --
      Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
  3. Re:No, but your own choices are. by Etcetera · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Which differs from XX year olds who have no basic understanding of liberal principles, or presume that there's no other possible motivation for some random liberal policy than abject hatred (especially of America!) and/or slavish devotion to the government that is stealing their money/freedom/religion in what way exactly?

    My point is that's is very hard to NOT have a "basic understanding of liberal principles", because they're the "default" view you see in most media and entertainment, and in most humanities coursework. "Income inequality is ipso facto bad" and "raise the minimum wage" are not difficult to understand the meaning behind; there's no need to assert a hatred of America. OTOH, "raising the minimum wage won't really help" is not easy to understand (at first), and it's quite simple to simply assert that someone who'd say that is "greedy" and wants more money, screwing over everyone else, and leave it at that.

  4. Irrelevant to the individual. by jpellino · · Score: 3, Insightful

    People want to remain in a political bubble. It helps convince them they're right.

    --
    "Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
  5. Self-policing always works! by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Now, a study by Facebook's in-house social scientists finds that this does happen, though the effect seems to be very small.

    My. Asshole. Back before I stopped using facebook I noted several design issues with Facebook which magnified this effect. When posting pages to facebook, meaningless drivel would often post correctly even when pages were very large and complex, but political content would often fail to post even when the content was very simple and loaded very quickly even on my rinky-dink connection. Going back through my feed, I found that links had disappeared (or one might say "had been removed") from political content, but the links were still attached to the meaningless drivel. Some of it was stuff I had posted for amusement value, but I actually inserted some dummy content in there as well. Finally, even when you ask to see all the posts from specific users in your feed, you don't. You have to drill down to their user page to see all the content. Facebook won't show you all the content you ask to see in your stream.

    Anyone who takes Facebook's word for it is dumber than dumb, and deserves to be taken advantage of all day.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  6. Re: No, but your own choices are. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    And I don't agree with your point as it seems quite easy for people to misunderstand liberal principles and dismiss them with handy mantras and slogans. Like for the minimum wage, where those who are advocating for such are waved off as lazy, greedy for other people's money and otherwise derided.

    Treating liberals an America haters is indeed unnecessary though, but it is strongly favored and quite easy to do.

    If people are actually working hard at this kind of thing...I am now even more afraid.

  7. Re:No, but your own choices are. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Reality has a well-known liberal bias...

  8. I use intentional filtering by msobkow · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I purposely have crackbook block the right wing lunatic websites/pages, the bigoted anti-muslim sites/pages, and a host of others.

    I see no reason why I should have crap like that shoved in front of my face when I'd never seek it out on my own. And the people who *post* that racist crap get themselves removed from the "friend" list and blocked. I'll have no truck with bigots.

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    I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
    1. Re:I use intentional filtering by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The problem is when you define those that don't agree with you as bigots, and have no problem engaging in bigotry yourself. You call it social justice and really can't see why anyone would disagree with your extreme left-wing views. It's an affliction that, in my estimation, will only get worse. Why should any leftist listen to people who are obviously dissidents?

      "What our enemies oppose, we will support. And whatever our enemies support, we will oppose."
      -- Mao Tse-Tung

      --
      Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!