- Garrett, R. Kelly. “Echo chambers online?: Politically motivated selective exposure among Internet news users.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication2 (2009): 265-285.
- Bakshy, Eytan, Solomon Messing, and Lada A. Adamic. “Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook.” Science6239 (2015): 1130-1132.
Both the papers discuss about online “echo chambers” or communities/groups/forums on the Internet, that are devoid of differing viewpoints, i.e. places where individuals are exposed only to information from like-minded people. The second paper also talks about “filter bubbles” or the behavior of content-delivery services/algorithms to only deliver or recommend content to users based on their viewing history. Both of these issues are important as they can give rise to fragmented, opinionated and polarized citizenry. While Garrett’s paper mostly focused on the analysis of behavior-tracking data collected from the readers of 2 partisan online news websites, Bakshy et. al. analyzed de-identified, social news sharing data of 10.1 million Facebook users in the U.S.
The results presented in Garrett’s paper suggest that individuals are more likely to read news stories containing “high” opinion-reinforcing information as compared to “high” opinion-challenging information. Additionally, people generally tend to spend more time reading news stories containing “high” opinion-challenging information as compared to those containing “high” opinion- reinforcing information. While reading the paper I felt that it would be interesting to study, how reading opinion-reinforcing news affects the reader’s opinion/attitude versus reading news that conflicts with the reader’s attitude. While both the studies focused on political news which in my opinion can have a wide range of debatable topics, I feel it would be interesting to redo the study on groups/communities whose basis are fanatical, unscientific beliefs, like: anti-vaccination, religious extremism and flat Earth to name a few. We can also think of repeating this study in other geographies (instead of just the U.S.), and also compare the medium of news delivering. For example, people maybe are more likely to read a news story with opinion-challenging information if its presented to them in a physical newspaper vs online news website? This points to a deeper question of, is the Internet making us more opinionated, insular, trapped in our idiosyncratic beliefs and ideologies?
If I have understood it correctly, the participant’s in Garrett’s study complete a post-reading assessment after reading every news story. Given that the participant’s only have 15 minutes to read the stories, it is unclear if the time spent finishing the post-assessment questionnaire was included in these 15 minutes. If the post-assessment was indeed included in the 15 minute reading window, I feel it might bias the post assessment or the choice of the second news story selected. Moreover, it would have been useful to have some statistic about the length of news stories, say the mean and standard deviation of the word-counts. Other than this, I feel it would have been useful to know more about the distribution of age and income in the two subject populations (the author reports the average age and some information about the income). It may also be interesting to analyze the role played by gender, age and income on political opinion as a whole. Overall, I feel the paper presented a very interesting qualitative study for it’s time, a time when users had a lot more control over what they read.
The Science article by Bakshy et. al. presents the quantitative analysis really well and does a good job, explaining the process of media exposure in friendship networks on Facebook. An interesting research question can be to study, how likely are people to share a news story that conflicts with their affiliations/ideology/opinions as compared to one that aligns with their opinions. Another thought/concern is whether the presented results would hold across geographies.
