Facebook and Political Polarization
The existence and expanding use of online social media networks not only helps create a growing, globally interconnected social networking system online, but also helps distribute and share information between people. This article focuses specifically on one social network, Facebook, and on shared information relating generally to political ideology in order to determine whether or not social media is fostering “online ‘homophily’”, the congregation of people with similar ideologies (Bakshy et al).
Essentially, like-minded people tend to both have stronger ties to each other and be connected to more like-minded people because of their shared views. If one thinks of a person as a node in the social network of Facebook, then that node will have more edges connecting it to other like-minded nodes rather than nodes of opposing views. The ties connecting people of similar idologies are also often stronger because of the commonalities of the connected people. For example, this article points out that not only are people on Facebook much more exposed to information from other like-minded users, but that information also reaches them more quickly than information of opposing views.
The information that Facebook users consume is dependent on a few factors such as what their friends decide to share, what information the Facebook News Feed ranking algorithm sorts for them, as well as what they themselves decide to look at. The News Feed ranking algortithm takes into account how active a user is on Facebook, how much a user interacts with certain friends, and how often a user has visited certain websites by clicking the link for it in their feed. All of this also leads to Facebook users being exposed more to information shared by friends with with they interact more with, thus having stronger ties to, as well as information shared by more of their friends, both of which tend to be friends of similar ideological views.
In general, Facebook does seem to be somewhat fostering online homophily, due in large part to the friendship networks that it is made up of. However, as the article points out, Facebook does not encourage homophily as much as other online social networks, like Twitter, which are composed of networks even more based upon “common topical interests and/or specific content” rather than physical friendships outside of the online network (Bakshy et al).
Source:
Bakshy, Etyan; Messing, Solomon; Adamic, Lada. “Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion on Facebook,” Science, May 7, 2015. doi: 10.1126/science.aaa1160 – See more at: http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/social-media/facebook-political-polarization-data-science-research#sthash.R46bJA7B.dpuf