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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.
Yeah I know, the great unwashed.
Sad world.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
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.
I think not...(*poof*)
DuckDuckGo and the like made a big deal about the big players doing search engine bubbling. Depending on who you are, you get different results.
I don't use Facebook enough to comment on that, but I'd imagine the echo chamber would be deafening.
Cheers, ~ Ruben
If you de-friend someone (or large groups of someones), their stories are basically not going to be on your feed in the first place, and liberals have been shown to be more likely to de-friend conservatives over political differences than conservatives de-friend liberals http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/10/21/liberals-are-more-likely-to-unfriend-you-over-politics-online-and-off/
Unless you're a complete recluse or are making a conscious effort to sequester yourself from any popular culture, it's virtually impossible to be in your teens or 20's and not be exposed to various legitimate liberal political stances -- most often during college years. OTOH, it's quite easy to never interact with any "real life" legitimate conservative arguments, other than straw men that the liberal political arguments are using.
Thus you end up with 25 year olds who have no basic understanding of conservative economic principles, or presume that there's no other possible motiviation for some random socially conservative policy than abject hatred and/or slavish religious belief.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Keeping You In a Political Bubble?
YES - SLASHDOT!
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
I don't use Facebook, so it isn't doing anything to my political viewpoints.
Slashdot, on the other hand, is. Every day we're subjected to one or more dumb social justice stories here. If it isn't yet another article about how there aren't enough women in tech (and which also totally ignore how there are some fields that are female-dominated), then it's an article about how the police are "bad" for having to use deadly force in self defence against some black youths who physically attacked them. Then there's the total nonsense about Aaron Swartz that comes up so often, and the articles are always defending him (although he acted maliciously) and blame others for his death (although it was due to his completely voluntary suicide). And just yesterday, I believe it was, there was yet another article scare-mongering about climate change.
Slashdot wasn't always like this, mind you. But since it has oriented itself toward social justice causes, I've found myself becoming less and less supportive of what is becoming a very extremist, intolerant political mindset. Social justice is no longer social in nature; it's about creating division among people. Nor is it about justice; it's about promoting severe inequality under the cloak of equality.
Facebook is an informational environment?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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."
In the future our algorithmic overlords will decide for what's good in everything we do, from our gadgets to our leaders to our lovers. It would be a technological utopia for the sheeple, a dystopia for the freethinkers. Rather than war, it's our Facebook likes, Google searches, Amazon (Alibaba?) buys, aggregated and analysed by machines, that will bring about the Matrix.
Yes, Facebook is keeping me in a political bubble, but not nearly to the extent that National Review did in the early 90s. I repent of my Ollie North bumper sticker!
Actually I find that Facebook presents a fair and reasonable range of views on all issues, now that everyone finally agrees that global warming was a myth.
Recycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
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.'"
My politics, such as they are, are slightly to the other side of the line than most of the people in my Facebook contacts. A good number of those contacts are prone to posting what seem to me to be quite biased, divisive articles essentially preaching the moral superiority of the choir to the choir. My preferred style of engagement is to ask questions rather than assert "truths" and I try to steer clear of speculation on motive, appeals to authority, and all those rhetorical cop-outs. When I try to engage people on this stuff, the result is often quite hostile and sometimes personal. This makes me suspect that many people posting these things aren't really looking for debate, they're just looking for approval from their group. It would save me a lot of grief if Facebook provided a flag so people could indicate what kind of responses they're looking for when they post these things.
Having said all that, I find pretty much the same thing here on Slashdot and on most on-line fora. I just don't get the impression that many people see debate as a constructive way of testing one's beliefs and ideas.
Good thing my political views are the right ones.
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.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Does Facebook make it harder for people with different political views to get along?
Politics is about making other people do what you think is right. It's just like forcing your religion on someone except that somehow if there's not a God involved it's considered to be morally acceptable. It's the worst form of blind faith in the face of evidence to the contrary, and it's used to justify tyranny.
I really disagree with this assertion that politics is all about dominance. In skipping directly to tyranny you fail to see the positive aspects of debate and personal influence - is it bad to try to make someone see something different? Are people incapable of changing their opinions with time and wisdom? Are you removing someone's choice by having a conversation with them?
A problem happens when both sides become intractable on issues. What you're really talking about is what we've got today, incredibly polarized politics, a political system rigged to extremes (largely due to gerrymandering), with few moderates and quite a few people trying to bash each other over the head about ideas.
The problem I struggle with is when I see that an idea is bad, and the data suggests it's bad, and yet it's somehow subject for debate. Economics and taxation is somewhat debatable (to a degree). What isn't? Well, global warming denial, creationism, anti-vaccination bullsh*t. People who think, in a world where water in certain places is becoming increasingly scarce, that we should potentially pollute the water supply without some rigorous studies.
I think a lot of people go to Facebook to see pictures of babies and cat pics and impersonally catch up with friends and maybe find something funny or like what someone's up to. I like Facebook for that reason, in other words it's a positive source for me. I don't go to Facebook to see a friend of mine talking about putting landmines in his yard because there were some recent breakins (yes that happened and no i dont think he was joking). I try really hard not to push my political agenda, especially as much of some of my friends. But when I find something politically offensive in its utter awfulness, something most people wouldn't hear about, or about a candidate I like that maybe not everyone knows about, I post it, to inform those around me.
It's not about dominating friends, it's about informing them. People can come to their own conclusions, everyone has their own life history, and they can disagree with me if they want. But I don't think it's evil to try to influence someone or ask questions about the reasons they feel one way or another. And I rarely push, except perhaps with my parents, because they are quite intelligent and yet my dad has listened to Rush Limbaugh for far too long and my mom is a single-issue voter.
Yes, let's bring in a business leader to protect the environment (since he makes money from...), or a business leader to police the people, or a business person to jail people who do bad things like assault or steal or murder. We of course subcontracted the whole making laws thing out to a business person. They will totally not use their greed to game the system to their advantage, like all the business people in the history of the world who did so.
Libertarian principles of a totally capitalistic society: great in concept, hugely stupid in reality. Like when that guy who ran a prison system got caught after years of paying off a judge to make sentences for juveniles harsher.