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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*)
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,
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.
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."
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.