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Pew: Majority of millennials, Generation X get political news from Facebook (for Baby Boomers: local TV)
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Does this lead to a filter bubble or echo chamber?
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Why does Facebook want to do this research?
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Important to do research about how people use Facebook
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Researchers all had studied content diversity and political discourse online before joining
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Didn't set out to prove anything---just see what the state of things is
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Twitter accounts and blogs that specialize in politics tend to follow others in a very polarizing pattern.
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Expect potentially greater diversity on Facebook because friends are selected for variety of other reasons
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You're less likely to share any given link from a weak tie than from a strong tie, but since you have so many more weak ties than strong, more of your shared links overall tend to come from weak ties.
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Social signal---who shared this and how you otherwise know them---helps diminish reader's preference for/against the source of that content.
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Factors also potentially could lower diversity on Facebook.
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Diversity of friends who would share content to which you might be exposed could be low and lead to an echo chamber.
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Algorithmic ranking could downrank cross-cutting content and lead to a filter bubble.
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People could choose not to click on cross-cutting content and end up selectively exposed to certain content.
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Is exposure diverse, or are there separate liberal and conservative echo chambers?
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Used de-identified data from 10.1 million active U.S. users (25 percent) who self-report ideological affiliation, and > 7 million links shared
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Mapped free-text affiliations on a scale (-2 (very liberal) to +2 (very conservative))
- Left about 60 percent of affiliations unmapped
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Limited, non-representative population
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Identified hard news by training SVM classifier using strings such as "politi" for hard news and "entertain" for soft news
- Classifier had 97.1 percent accuracy
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Measured alignment of article by fraction of ideological affiliation of sharers (-1 (all liberal) to +1 (all conservative))
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Bimodal distribution for hard news (echo chamber!)
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More normal distribution for soft news (wider appeal!)
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Validated against others' work on perceived alignment of news sources
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How diverse is all content being shared on Facebook?
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Slightly more conservative content is shared overall than liberal content.
- Picking content at random, then, a liberal user would be slightly more likely to see cross-cutting content than a conservative user would.
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How diverse are networks?
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Moderates are more likely to have similar numbers of liberal and conservative friends.
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Liberal and conservative networks are more likely to be homogeneous, but not starkly so.
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How diverse is the content to which users can potentially be exposed, taking their friend networks into account?
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Liberal users would come across considerably less cross-cutting content at this point than conservative users would.
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This measure decreases slightly for both liberal and conservative users when you look at the content to which they actually are exposed.
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Which articles to people click on?
- Amount of cross-cutting content drops further still, but not a ton---ends up being about 30 percent for conservative users and about 20 percent for liberal users.
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Users with weaker affiliations are exposed to and select slightly more cross-cutting content than users with stronger affiliations are.
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Dataset is available and is reproducible!
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Several kinds of memes actually do circle the globe.
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How much social proof do you need before you share something or take some action?
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Religious or political statements tend to need more social proof, which is defined by the proportion of your friends doing it first before you are willing to do it yourself.
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Some people are more susceptible than others.
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Combining several factors, it looks like users are willing to be convinced by friends spreading the meme up to a point---after that, those who haven't already spread it will tend to continue to resist.
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Rumors tend to evolve over time and recur, but their popularity is bursty.
- Parodies sometimes can be even more popular than the original rumors.
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Why do memes persist?
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If all memes were just as good and all users interacted at the same rates, there would be a short spike and no more.
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If all memes were just as good and different users visited Facebook more or less frequently, there would be a wider, shorter bump, but still no more.
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The variation of users' Facebook usage habits combined with the variation of memes' mutations' quality (and variants' quality) is what leads them to persist.
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More research: