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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.