- Garett, R. Kelly (2009) – “Echo chambers online? Politically motivated selective exposure among Internet news users”
- Resnick, Paul (2013) – “Bursting Your (Filter) Bubble: Strategies for Promoting Diverse Exposure”- Proceedings of CSCW ’13 Companion, Feb. 2013.
One of the essential elements of having a democracy is the presence of free press. This right to unrestricted information although with some exceptions, has given us people, the ability to make informed decision. But in recent years, the delivery of such news is through channels which aren’t fair, through the use of personalized recommendation systems. The paper discussed below tries to answer pressing questions from this domain.
In [1], the author tries to look into selective exposure in news readers and tries to see if they are motivated colored by one’s political opinion through the use of a web administered behavior-tracking study. In order to gain better insights the author gives out five hypotheses listed below.
- The more opinion-reinforcing information an individual expects a news story to contain, the more likely he or she is to look at it.
- The more opinion-reinforcing information a news story contains, the more time an individual will spend viewing it.
- The more opinion-challenging information the reader expects a news story to contain, the less likely he or she is to look at it.
- The influence of opinion-challenging information on the decision to look at a news story will be smaller than the influence of opinion-reinforcing information.
- The more opinion-challenging information a news story contains, the more time the individual will spend viewing it.
Given the how dated the publication is, I wonder if the conclusions of the paper are still relevant. The major channel through which news is delivered has shifted to social media. Here the options are limited given that the content is prefiltered and delivered only if the chance of one clicking it is high. Also, the content you are given exposure to, depends on your “network”. Given these features of the mode of delivery, the authors conclusion, I believe, would definitely be challenged.
Also, one might even question the validity of the authors claim due to lack of diversity of the sample group and how the sample group was selected. Given how the exposure of survey on different news sources were, the group of people who were willing to participate may not have been the true representative of their groups.
It would have been an interesting experiment if the author chose a wider variety of groups from a diverse political background and analyzed the group behaviour of the same and compared them with each other.
Another experiment that would be have been interesting if conducted would be to see how the behaviour of the user group changes when reading about a particular topic post exposure. Do they stick with the opinions of the first article or do they venture out to challenge it? Given that we are exposed to topics of interest everyday, I believe, a long term exposure study is needed to track the echo chamber effect which is missing in paper [1].
Paper [2] gives reasons for the need to develop products which promote diversity and exposes users to many opinions fostering deliberative discussion. The paper, then goes on to discuss few examples of such products.
Can the user groups be nudged towards good behaviour? I believe that is definitely possible. But, how can one achieve that in a equitable manner? Could it be that certain users are more vulnerable to nudging and others aren’t? Would the data obtained to do so by private entities like social media companies be put to use in the right manner?
I believe some oversight on the above by some third-party is necessary to ensure the same.
