R.Kelly Garrett. “Echo chambers online?: Politically motivated selective exposure among Internet news users.”
Paul Resnick et al. “Bursting your (filter) bubble: strategies for promoting diverse exposure.”
The assigned readings for this week speaks about the filter bubble that we’ve previously spoken about in this class. Garrett’s paper talks about the likelihood of an individual to pick a news article and the amount of time that he would spend on it depending on their ideological point. He hypothesised and concluded that individuals were more like to look at opinion-reinforcing news and would spend more time reading it if it agreed with their view point strongly. He also concluded that the more opinion-challenging information the reader anticipates in a story, the less likely he was to read it. However, he also realized that the opinion-challenging information had less effect than opinion-reinforcing information. Resnick’s work talks about the various ways to get around the filter bubble – to be aware of them and to overcome its effects.
Many of Resnick’s proposed methods involved keeping the individual informed of the kind of news that they were reading whether it leaned left or right. In other cases, where motivated information processing was at work, his methods encourage us to identify and understand the arguments posed by the another individual with opposing views. This still does not give us a way to successfully pass on all the information that is available to us. I wonder if the most effective way to deliver such news is to present it through mediums that don’t know partisanship yet. Social and political commentary is often offered by popular sitcoms.
A dent in our hopes of eliminating partisanship through more exposure is dealt by a recent study at Duke University Polarization Lab[1]. They designed an experiment to disrupt people’s echo chambers on Twitter by having Republicans and Democrats follow accounts (automated) that retweeted messages from the opposition. After a month, he discovered that the Republicans exposed to the Democratic account became much more liberal and the democrats who had been exposed to the Republican tweets became slightly more liberal.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/09/07/bursting-peoples-political-bubbles-could-make-them-even-more-partisan/
