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.

Comments

Re:No, but your own choices are.

[Etcetera]

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.