Perhaps the spread of information online is just a reflection of an
echo chamber that was already there?
On social media, three main factors influence what we read:
whether one of our contacts shares an article; whether that content
appears in our feed; and whether we click on it. According to data
from Facebook, all three factors can affect our consumption of
information. When the company’s data science team examined
political opinions among US users during 2014–2015, they found that
people tended to be exposed to views that were similar to theirs,
much more so than they would have been if they had picked their
friends at random. Of the content that these friends posted, the
Facebook algorithm – which decides what appears on users’ News
Feeds – filtered out another 5–8 per cent of opposing political views.
And of the content people saw, they were less likely to click on
articles that went against their political stance. Users were also far
more likely to click on posts that appeared at the top of their feed,
showing how intensely content has to compete for attention. This
suggests that if echo chambers exist on Facebook, they start with our
friendship choices but can then be exaggerated by the News Feed
algorithm.[23]
What about the information we get from other sources? Is this
similarly polarised? In 2016, researchers at Oxford University,
Stanford University and Microsoft Research looked at the web
browsing patterns of 50,000 Americans. They found that the articles
people saw on social media and search engines were generally more
polarised than the ones they came across on their favourite news
websites.[24] However, social media and search engines also
exposed people to a wider range of views. The stories might have
had stronger ideological content, but people got to see more of the
opposing side as well.
This might seem like a contradiction: if social media exposes us to
a broader range of information than traditional news sources, why
doesn’t it help dampen the echoes? Our reaction to online information
might have something to do with it. When sociologists at Duke
University got US volunteers to follow Twitter accounts with opposing
views, they found that people tended to retreat further back into their