By: Phone Min Thant, Staff Writer
Social media is a wonderful place. It’s a convenient location where views that reflect your own converge; a little bubble of like-minded users, if you will. But, have you ever wondered why everyone seems so like-minded? Why do cat lovers keep getting memes of cats and American conservatives keep seeing TikToks that have already envisioned an annexed Canada?
The answer lies in social media algorithms, which create the illusion of a like-minded world through “filter bubbles” — mechanisms that personalize online content based on users’ personal information and actions, such as commenting, sharing, or liking. The resulting phenomenon is commonly referred to as “social media echo chambers,” a secluded space of ever-reflecting and reinforcing views defined by the users.
How exactly are echo chambers problematic? For one, social media users are often unaware they are caught in them. Echo chambers are both caused by and reinforce confirmation bias — a psychological fallacy that tends to interpret information that favours your views in a more positive light. Horoscopes are great examples of this. Despite often being written in vague, open-ended terms, people still go, “Oh, that’s so me.” Such cherry picking of data falls under the broad category of confirmation bias. In the case of social media, this means users interact more with information that resonates with their views, compounding their trust in those views and creating a feedback loop that ultimately creates an echo chamber around them.
It only gets worse when politics gets involved. While political polarization is not a novel issue, it’s intensified by social media. Studies have found that echo chambers have contributed to increased affective polarization in countries such as the US and the UK — democracies majorly-dominated by bipartisan (two party) politics. In this case, affective polarization means supporters of one party tend to view the opposition with skepticism and hostility, driven by psychological factors and political knowledge drawn from limited sources within their echo chamber. This corrodes democratic norms as it becomes difficult to establish a middle ground on important areas such as public policy and legislation. While popular examples mostly point to bipartisan politics, this phenomenon also takes place in multi-party systems.
However, in some cases where there is no middle ground, echo chambers work to perpetuate divisions between facts and opinions. It also intensifies the spread of social media disinformation — the deliberate attempt by some users at swaying facts and objective data majorly through fake news. The Palestinian genocide is a good example of this. Western media continues to propagate the false “equivalence between the oppressor and the oppressed, between the executioner and the victim.” This is against the backdrop of over 47,000 Palestinian casualties against around 1,000 Israeli casualties. The propaganda and disinformation surrounding the genocide leads to the formation of echo chambers among western social media users, with one pro-Palestinian cartoonist finding it more effective to put pro-Israeli hashtags to their cartoons and engage with such users on their own playing field. This is alarming because it shows that there are echo chambers in western media being tailored to propagate certain ideologies, which, by the way, is not new; the US has created similar propaganda echo chambers in both wars it fought in Iraq.
The case of the Palestinian genocide also shows a misleading belief that just because you engage in an echo chamber of pro-Palestinian voices, you are already taking action against those committing the genocide. In reality, this kind of an echo chamber takes away well-intentioned social media users from relevant and practical advocacy such as protests.
But we aren’t all software engineers who understand how algorithms work nor are we psychologists who can actively comprehend confirmation bias. So, how do we fight social media echo chambers as regular social media users?
In today’s world of increasing interconnectedness, we need to realize the transformative effects of social media and work towards using it for the good of society.
First, start seeking sources of information outside your usual channels. You can begin this process simply by visiting pages outside of your political spectrum. While controversies related to political bias that surround CNN and Fox News are probably no stranger to you, there are also many other outlets that represent a wide spectrum of views on the same issues. Your job is to actively look for alternatives from the ones usually seen on your Facebook feed or YouTube home.
Of course, this doesn’t mean you should start believing everything you see on social media. Credibility plays a large part in determining which “opposing” information source you will expose yourself to and there are several ways of determining this factor. Start by analyzing the source’s overall reputation, followed by researching how it is financed and operated, and whether these sources admit to, and address past errors in reporting. You can also always use an online fact-checking website like PolitiFact (just make sure to do a quick search on their credibility too).
This stage also involves an outlook at who you interact with on social media — sort of a background check on your echo chamber’s residents. An instant alarm bell should sound when some of these contacts seem to repeatedly post the same views on different issues without a decent follower base. I am sure you have seen some accounts on TikTok or Facebook with very few followers that post similar issues over and over again. This is the perfect real-life exemplification of an echo chamber — they are surrounding themselves on social media with a tiny segment of yes-man for their views. Be mindful of such accounts because it’s not only a clear indication of your comfort with a particular view but also for the sake of disrupting algorithms playing favourites.
Perhaps all this might be new and unnerving for you — after all, actively searching for views you don’t agree with can be straining. The good news is that you don’t have to believe these views yet. Even if you still don’t like dogs or if you have negative views towards electric cars, just start liking or reacting to such posts (maybe even leave a snarky comment). Since algorithms look at your engagement with posts and other users, this random engagement with every possible view disturbs those algorithms and is a good first step to dismantling echo chambers.
The second stage is to better understand your own perspectives and biases.
Comprehending your confirmation bias is critical, as it lies at the heart of echo chambers. Educating yourself on the causes of confirmation bias and real-life examples of it can be the first step. Practically, you need to start observing your reactions to information that go against your views (the disconfirming evidence). Running up your views against objective data and analyzing their validity is also helpful, so is identifying repetitions in such views. Additionally, challenge yourself to debates with your friends or family and allow them to represent “opposing views.”
Countering confirmation bias and echo chambers is not an easy task. However, the steps above are meant to provide an accessible run-down of the steps you can take to achieve that goal in an everyday setting, to not only disrupt social media algorithms that are at the core of echo chambers but also to understand psychological fallacies that prompt us to rely on them.
In today’s world of increasing interconnectedness, we need to realize the transformative effects of social media and work towards using it for the good of society. We can start by getting out of our internet comfort zones.
