1 Comment on "Link blog: society, internet, facebook, politics"


  1. As I said on andrewducker’s blog:

    Not convinced by that Wired article about the internet. It admits it’s using data from a decade ago, before the echo chamber effect became a major problem. And then it talks about how people have a huge pool of Facebook friends that’s wider and more diverse than the people they socialise with IRL – which is true, but completely ignores the power of Facebook’s algorithms, which strongly bias the content you actually see towards the political views you already have.

    I have first-hand experience of this process, in that I held out from joining Facebook for years, and finally gave in last spring. So during the run-up to the Brexit referendum, I was very new to Facebook, and was seeing a nice even-handed mixture of pro-Leave and pro-Remain content (and so was not caught up in the illusion that Remain had the result in the bag). Whereas now, after FB has had a year to learn my political preferences (but, sadly, not my meta-preference for seeing a diversity of opinions) my feed is full of posts criticising Brexit, criticising the Tories, and supporting the Lib Dems and Labour.

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