Confirmed: Echo chambers exist on social media. So what do we do about them?
The article discusses how social scientists recently confirmed the existence of “Echo Chambers” in Facebook by finding quantitative evidence of social media users forming confirmation bias. The “Echo Chambers” refer to the communities formed by users connecting only with the people that support their point of view and creating polarized groups that resist any information disagreeing with their beliefs. This is caused by confirmation bias, a tendency to interpret new information in a way that supports one’s belief. Users only share contents that matches their opinions, thus creating an informational cascade within the community they’re part of.
This phenomenon is noteworthy, because it was shown that Facebook likes and shares were one of the main languages of debate for voters for the election. It’s essential that every voter carefully evaluates all the information presented to them, rather than having access to only one sided beliefs and casting their votes based on the impartial information inside their echo chamber.
The article also suggests some ways the media can change to prevent these echo chambers from forming. Media should resist indulging to number of clicks and audience by following the popular trend to prevent releasing articles that only target a specific segment to gain views. Press should focus on delivering unbiased, key facts, since potentially important news can be easily dismissed by those who hold different beliefs. Also, media should spend less time debunking false info, which was shown to actually solidify readers in their original beliefs rather than convincing them otherwise, and spend more time writing corrections and clarifications to effectively inform the readers.
The idea behind the echo chambers forming and how they affect the users relate to what we learned in class about informational cascade. The social media users or audience of any media channels tend to seek for information that aligns with their narrative and reject information that undermines it. This is similar and parallel to how people ignore their personal calculation or probable guess and choose to go with a decision based on the previous people’s decision. Also, the communities formed within the echo chamber are one subgroup of network with bidirectionally linked nodes, which has easier access to and interactions with one another within the subgroup. The article suggests that the media should avoid specifically targeting those segmented subgroups for the number of clicks and views, and to focus on delivering the news and theories as evenly as possibly to broadly linked and interconnected networks of nodes.