Search Engine Land: Senate bill seeks to compel tech giants to offer ‘unfiltered’ versions of their content. “There’s a new bill circulating in the Senate that would require large internet companies to disclose that their results are using ‘opaque algorithms’ and offer consumers an option to see non-personalized search results or content, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) first reported. It’s called ‘The Filter Bubble Transparency Act.'”
echo chambers
Phys .org: Virtual spaces mirror income inequality
Phys .org: Virtual spaces mirror income inequality. “The Internet democratized the exchange of information, but the evolution of online social networks has mirrored the segregation of urban neighborhoods in real cities, according to NECSI’s analysis of millions of tweets. Social media users have organized themselves into economically segregated echo-chambers. This breakup of information reinforces the fragmentation and polarization of communities.”
The Divided States of America: How social media reveals social fragmentation (Phys .org)
Phys .org: The Divided States of America: How social media reveals social fragmentation. “Far from being an egalitarian melting pot of diverse opinions and worldviews, the Internet has grown to mirror the same social divisions that exist offline. The U.S. is fragmented into physically segregated communities with polarized idealogical differences. That is the conclusion of a new paper by the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI) published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. This paper quantifies the oft-repeated complaint that social media has become an echo chamber.”
Nieman Lab: Want to feel less anxious about the state of the world? Try diversifying your online news sources
Nieman Lab: Want to feel less anxious about the state of the world? Try diversifying your online news sources. “A new study suggests that consumers who actively take steps to diversify their news consumption — following accounts and news outlets that post a wide range of viewpoints, and interacting online with people who have different views from their own — feel less anxious about current events than people who don’t take such actions. ”
Forbes: Is Social Media Curating Hate And Scouring The Web For Our Greatest Fears?
Forbes: Is Social Media Curating Hate And Scouring The Web For Our Greatest Fears?. “Social media’s great promise was to connect the world. Yet rather than aggregate the world into a single real-time firehose, social platforms have increasingly turned to algorithmic curation to hand-feed us a perfectly personalized filter that appeals to our most intimate and powerful interests, desires and fears.”
Nieman Lab: Few people are actually trapped in filter bubbles. Why do they like to say that they are?
Nieman Lab: Few people are actually trapped in filter bubbles. Why do they like to say that they are?. “We’re not trapped in filter bubbles, but we like to act as if we are. Few people are in complete filter bubbles in which they only consume, say, Fox News, Matt Grossmann writes in a new report for Knight (and there’s a summary version of it on Medium here). But the ‘popular story of how media bubbles allegedly undermine democracy’ is one that people actually seem to enjoy clinging to.”
MIT Sloan Management Review: Twitter Is Not the Echo Chamber We Think It Is
MIT Sloan Management Review: Twitter Is Not the Echo Chamber We Think It Is. “We are in the midst of a public conversation about whether social media echo chambers facilitate the spreading of fake news or prevent constructive dialogue on public issues. In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said that he was experimenting with features to reduce echo chambers on Twitter by inserting content with alternative viewpoints into people’s feeds. In response, an op-ed in The New York Times predicted that this idea would backfire, citing recent research showing that exposing people to alternate viewpoints only makes them more partisan. The problem with this otherwise important debate is that it assumes that Twitter users exist in echo chambers in the first place. They don’t.”
