Assignment 16- Gloria Dietz

Beware the Bubble

By Gloria Dietz

You’re broken off from reality. You’re trapped inside a bubble of sorts. You can see outside your realm and you can even interact with people in other bubbles, but you have access to different things and they see different things than you do. You only can view and access the things an algorithm chooses and the rest is hidden from you.

Sounds like a dystopian society right?

Well it’s not. This is reality. Social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter, limit you to what has been called a filter bubble. They use complex algorithms taking into account a myriad of factors to determine what things you like to view. These factors include the people you friend, the types of things you tend to view, and even things you press a like button on. From this, they filter your feed to only show you things within your spheres of interest, hence the name: filter bubble.

Doesn’t sound too bad does it?

You get what you want to see quicker and easier, rather than going through the hassle of filtering the results yourself.

Unfortunately, this causes a lot more issues than you might think. The narrow view that filter bubbles present (1) confirms previously held beliefs, (2) encourages political polarization, and (3) creates divisions in our society that stunt its grow and progress. The issue of filter bubbles must be addressed for our society to be able to function.

Confirmation of Beliefs

Filter bubbles’ confirmation of our previously held beliefs closes us off from differing viewpoints and makes us more susceptible to fake news. By definition, filter bubbles only show you what you want to see, so consequently your feed only shows you one point of view—your own. 

Now, you might think does this really matter? No one gets their news from social media anyway. Well, according to a 2016 Pew Research study, 62 percent of Americans get their news from social media. That’s the majority of Americans. 

And since their news is only from their viewpoint, and often strongly biased, the majority of Americans are only seeing one particular side of an issue and therefore aren’t as able to make informed decisions.

This one-sided perspective also makes social media users more susceptible to fake news, because the fake news that would come up on their feed would generally agree with their beliefs, and therefore they would be more likely to believe it. In addition, one of the main ways fake news is avoided is through seeing the tons of articles disproving the one article that was fake. But if those articles aren’t congruent with your views, there could be a million and you still wouldn’t see any of them. You would just see the one fake article. 

In fact, this caused so much dispersion of fake news that Facebook attempted to point out fake news through flagging the source as not credible. The idea was to prevent the sharing of these false articles, but people had become so used to their bubble that it had the opposite effect. People thought that Facebook was trying to silence these views, and in response shared these fake news stories even more.

Political Polarization

In addition to spreading false partisan news, filter bubbles cause political polarization and leave little room for moderates. To understand how this happens we must first look at group polarization. This concept states that when people of moderate political views come together, they will become more extreme due to exposure to a single view. The filter bubble has a similar effect, but instead of you talking to people with the same views as you, you only get and read things with the same views as you. This is even more likely to cause political polarization, because not only are you surrounded by people with this view, but you have no knowledge of the other views at all.

With no knowledge of opposing views and a one-sided feed it’s hard to be moderate. Even if you are truly moderate and read things daily from both sides of the spectrum, you still have a high chance of being categorized. The whole purpose of these algorithms is to determine what you like and narrow down your results, so even if your interests are relatively broad it’s possible the algorithm will still limit you to one side based off what who your friends are or which side’s article you clicked first. This inability to see the opposing viewpoints sways moderates to the side they can see. This may partially account for the drops in the number of people who identify as moderates. According to a 2016 Gallup Poll Study only 34% of Americans are moderates, and this number has been slowly declining for the past decade. If filter bubbles continue to filter our news, it’s very likely our country will become even more politically polarized.

Societal Issues

These political polarizations, caused by filter bubbles, can lead to further divisions in our society and impedes our ability to move towards common goals. With only a limited view point and more extremist views, issues have become very two-sided, and citizens of opposing views have become antagonistic towards one another. There is a sort of sentiment that “you’re either for me or against me.” This kind of thinking leads to divisions in our society and inhibits our ability to compromise and form solutions that benefit both parties. Some have gone as far as to say that filter bubbles are to blame for the downfall of democracy, because of uninformed and strongly biased voters and politicians. Our society will suffer the consequences if we don’t take action to stop these adverse effects of filter bubbles.

In conclusion, filter bubbles confirm our previously held beliefs, increase our susceptibility to fake news, cause political polarization, and ultimately inhibit our society’s ability to work towards common goals. Some solutions have been offered for this. Multiple social media plug-ins have been created to visualize your political biases, provide a neutral platform, and allow you to see the feeds of strangers with opposing views. But these aren’t actual solutions. These minor and temporary fixes only act as a quick and cute way to see your bias and is only affecting people who use it. And for those people, who are actually aware of this issue of filter bubbles, it probably doesn’t make much of a difference. These supposed solutions still leave most people in the dark. The issue of filter bubbles must be addressed more permanently and decisively for our society to grow and be able to work towards common goals. 

What can we do about this?

Stay aware of this issue, try to look at multiple perspectives and don’t depend on social media for your news. 

We need to burst our filter bubbles