It's Not the Technology, Stupid: How the ‘Echo Chamber’ and ‘Filter Bubble’ Metaphors Have Failed Us
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This document summarizes Axel Bruns' presentation arguing that concerns about online "echo chambers" and "filter bubbles" are overblown and based on limited evidence. The presentation notes that while some isolated communities may exist, studies have found people generally encounter a diversity of views on social media. It argues the real problem is political polarization, not communicative fragmentation, and that filters are more in people's minds than imposed by algorithms. In conclusion, the presentation states the issue is not the technology but polarized fringe groups that reject consensus, and the problem is political polarization rather than echo chambers.
It's Not the Technology, Stupid: How the ‘Echo Chamber’ and ‘Filter Bubble’ Metaphors Have Failed Us
- 1. @qutdmrc IAMCR, Madrid, 7-11 July 2019 Axel Bruns | @snurb_dot_info It’s Not the Technology, Stupid: How the ‘Echo Chamber’ and ‘Filter Bubble’ Metaphors Have Failed Us
- 2. @qutdmrc
- 3. The Concerns
- 4. @qutdmrc Obama, B.H. (2017) ● Barack Obama’s farewell address: ● “For too many of us it’s become safer to retreat into our own bubbles, whether in our neighborhoods, or on college campuses, or places of worship, or especially our social media feeds, surrounded by people who look like us and share the same political outlook and never challenge our assumptions.” ● Nicholas Negroponte: Daily Me (1995) ● Cass Sunstein: echo chambers (2001, 2009, 2017, …) ● Eli Pariser: filter bubbles (2011) (https://edition.cnn.com/2017/01/10/politics/president-obama-farewell- speech/index.html, 11 Jan. 2017)
- 5. @qutdmrc Bubble Trouble ● Echo Chambers? Filter Bubbles? ● Where exactly? ● General search engines ● News search engines, portals, and recommender systems ● Social media (but where – profiles, pages, hashtags, groups …?) ● What exactly? ● Hermetically sealed information enclaves full of misinformation? ● Self-reinforcing ideological in-groups of hyperpartisans? ● Politically partisan communities of any kind? ● Why exactly? ● Ideological and societal polarisation amongst citizens? ● Algorithmic construction of distinct and separate publics? ● Feedback loop between the two? ● Defined how exactly? ● Argument from anecdote and ‘common sense’, rather than empirical evidence ● Promoted by non-experts (Sunstein: legal scholar; Pariser: activist and tech entrepreneur)
- 6. The Evidence
- 7. @qutdmrc Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles in Social Media ● Early blogosphere studies: ● Strong U.S. focus ● Polarisation and ‘mild echo chambers’ ● E.g. Adamic & Glance (2005) ● Social media studies: ● Especially Twitter, less research on Facebook or other platforms ● Hashtag / keyword datasets ● ‘Open forums and echo chambers’ ● Significant distinctions between @mention, retweet, follow networks ● And between lead users and more casual participants ● E.g. Williams et al. (2015) Adamic & Glance (2005) Williams et al. (2015)
- 8. @qutdmrc Pew Center (2016) Süddeutsche Zeitung (2017) Bruns et al. (2017) And Yet… ● Social media surveys: ● Users do encounter counter-attitudinal political views in their networks ● … to the point of exhaustion ● E.g. Pew Center (2016) ● Broader network mapping: ● Political partisans share similar interests (except for the political fringe) ● E.g. Süddeutsche Zeitung (2017) ● Comprehensive national studies: ● Whole-of-platform networks show thematic clustering, but few fundamental disconnections ● E.g. Bruns et al. (2017) US
- 9. The Reasons
- 10. @qutdmrc Case Studies Shouldn’t Be Generalised ● Need to see the big picture: ● Individual hashtags or pages may be ideologically pure, … ● … but they’re embedded in a complex platform structure (Dubois & Blank 2018) ● Serendipity is ubiquitous: ● Habitual newssharing in everyday, non-political contexts ● Selective exposure ≠ selective avoidance: we seek, but we don’t evade (Weeks et al. 2016) ● Homophily ≠ heterophobia: ‘echo chambers’ might just be communities of interest ● Cross-ideological connections almost impossible to avoid: ● Facebook groups and pages may be engines of homophily, … ● … but Facebook profiles are engines of context collapse (Litt & Hargittai 2016) ● Because we don’t only connect with our ‘political compadres’, pace Pariser (2015) ● ‘Hard’ echo chambers / filter bubbles are possible, but very rare: ● Requires cultish levels of devotion to ideological purity (O’Hara and Stevens 2015) ● E.g. specialty platforms for hyperpartisan fringe groups (4chan, 8chan, Gab), … ● … but the hyperpartisans are also heavy users of mainstream news ● Even if only to develop new conspiracy theories and disinformation (Garrett et al. 2013)
- 11. @qutdmrc Self-Serving Techno-Determinism ● Humans are complicated: ● Algorithms provide only limited personalisation ● Also because our interests and networks are complex and inconsistent ● Mainstream information sources + random serendipity = mixed information diet ● Moral panics based on simplistic arguments: ● Sunstein & Pariser mainly provide personal, anecdotal evidence ● Significant overestimation of the power of AI at least since Negroponte ● “A myth just waiting to concretize into common wisdom” (Weinberger 2004) ● But very handy for blame-shifting and attacking social media platforms ● “The dumbest metaphor on the Internet” (Meineck 2018): ● Not just dumb, but keeping us from seeing more important challenges ● People do encounter a diverse range of content, … ● … but the question is what they do with it
- 12. The Problem
- 13. @qutdmrc It’s the People, Stupid – Not the Technology The problem with an extraterrestrial-conspiracy mailing list isn’t that it’s an echo chamber; it’s that it thinks there’s a conspiracy by extraterrestrials. — Weinberger (2004) ● Fifteen years later: ● The problem isn’t that there are hyperpartisan echo chambers or filter bubbles; it’s that there are hyperpartisan fringe groups that fundamentally reject, and actively fight, any mainstream societal and democratic consensus. The problem is political polarisation, not communicative fragmentation. There is no echo chamber or filter bubble – the filter is in our heads.
- 14. @qutdmrc
- 15. @qutdmrc IAMCR, Madrid, 7-11 July 2019 Axel Bruns | @snurb_dot_info @socialmediaQUT – http://socialmedia.qut.edu.au/ @qutdmrc – https://www.qut.edu.au/research/dmrc This research is supported by the ARC Future Fellowship project “Understanding Intermedia Information Flows in the Australian Online Public Sphere”, the ARC Discovery project “Journalism beyond the Crisis: Emerging Forms, Practices, and Uses”, and the ARC LIEF project “TrISMA: Tracking Infrastructure for Social Media Analysis.”