Social Media as Echo Chamber

Megan Knightm.knight3@herts.ac.uk

@meganknighthttp://meganknight.uk

March 13 2017

Definition of terms: Social Media• Online platform that serves primarily to connect users to each other

and to share self-generated content, not to publish centrally created content• Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Reddit, 4Chan, Instagram,

YouTube, QQ, Weibo, Tumblr• Social media is a very broad category of media and engagement, and

the term is becoming increasingly vague and unfit for purpose

Differentiation of social media• Social media differ as to whether they place more emphasis on social

connections (WhatsApp, Snapchat, LinkedIn) or to publish content (YouTube, Instagram, Twitter)• Social media also differ as to whether they allow social connections to

strangers and public posting (Twitter, Reddit, 4Chan) or limit connection to people you have other social connections with (Snapchat, WhatsApp, Slack)• Social media may explicitly or implicitly encourage specific types of

content and engagement, whether medium-based (Instagram, YouTube) or function-based (LinkedIn, Slack)

Dominant Social Media: Facebook• The largest social network in the world, with 1.9 billion active users

worldwide. • Aging demographic, most users are now over 30• Multi-use network, connections are personal, but public pages are

possible• Allows posting of all types of media, and provides mechanisms for

organisations to push content to users• Increasingly used to share news/memes/jokes and repost content,

rather than to post original content

* All statistics and data from either the Pew Research Centre or Statista – see references for details

Dominant Social Media: Twitter• 315 million active users worldwide and a shrinking user base• Public network, posts are by default visible and connections are made

without confirmation• Used by organisations to promote content, and heavily used by

politicians and celebrities, less commonly used by the public• Posts are limited to 140 characters, links and embed functions for

other media

* All statistics and data from either the Pew Research Centre or Statista – see references for details

News consumption on social media• Social media dominate Internet usage, by a large margin• Up to 70% of the public get news on Facebook. Only a minority of

these also seek out news elsewhere • 60% of Twitter users read the news there, but only 16% of the public

are on Twitter• Reddit also has a high percentage of news consumption, but a small

minority of overall users

• This data is from the Pew Research Center’s “News Across Social Media Platforms” and isUS-based, but are likely similar in other developed countries

News content on social media• News organisations explicitly promote their stories on social media,

often to the exclusion of other platforms• Public bodies and figures use social media to make announcements,

test public response and promote themselves• Within a generation, news content has gone from something

packaged and presented in specific media to be consumed in specific ways and times to being ambient within the social landscape and consumed as a by-product of other things

Selection and bias in traditional news• News organisations have always selected content based on what the journalists

believe the audience wants to read/hear/see or orther factors (gatekeeping)• News outlets are often identified by explicit political and social bias, giving

readers the ability to choose only that which is within their belief system (or to choose to go outside that)• This is tempered by the amorphous and heterogeneous nature of news

audiences, which have within them considerable diversity• News organisations have also traditionally espoused belief in balance or

objectivity, and in truth, which limits the extremes of political or social views• News organisations may be regulated by law, and recourse exists to fight false

or misleading stories

The famous “news algorithm” and “echo chamber”• Facebook does not show you a constant stream of the most recent

posts by your friends, it selects what you see• Every time you respond to a post or share it, Facebook records that,

and will then show you more posts by that person, or posts with similar content• The more you tell Facebook what you like, the more you will see of

that, and the less you will see of stuff you haven’t liked, giving you less chance to “like” that stuff and have that recorded • This creates a reflexive loop, the “echo chamber” which limits and

reinforces the news you consume

Problematising• Social networks show you the content you have chosen to see, by

your choice of connections on the network• If a social network limits your social connections to people you

already know (Facebook), you will only see news chosen by the people you know• Most people have a non-diverse social context, and their friends are

likely to have similar backgrounds and opinions to them• Most people see news on a social network that is in accordance with

their existing beliefs

Problematising• Social media (for economic and historical reasons) do not differentiate

between news organisations, or between traditional and non-traditional news organisations• Anyone can call themselves a news organisation and create content which can

then be shared on social media• The popularity of an item on social media is based on how often it is liked or

shared, but can also be boosted by paying for “promotion”• Social media have replaced the “gatekeeping” function of traditional media

with a form of social sanction and promotion with no oversight• This, coupled with the echo chamber effect, has resulted in the circulation of

explicitly fake and misleading news alongside more reliable content

Yes, but… (arguments)• Social media is making news content more visible and people are more

politically engaged as a result – most people reading news on social media would not otherwise consume any news at all• We don’t know how common “fake news” is or how much it affects actual

events, some of this is just people complaining about things they don’t like• Traditional media have a history of presenting blatantly false and

misleading news as well (Hillsborough, Obama’s birth certificate, the second Gulf War, etc)• This is just another fight by the traditional media who are facing

irrelevance and decline

Find out more• Bakshy, E., Messing, S., Adamic, L.A., 2015. Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on

Facebook. Science 348, 1130–1132. doi:10.1126/science.aaa1160• Barthel, M., Shearer, E., Gottfried, J., Mitchell, A., 2015. The Evolving Role of News on Twitter and

Facebook. Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project. (http://www.journalism.org/2015/07/14/the-evolving-role-of-news-on-twitter-and-facebook/)

• Leading global social networks 2017 | Statistic [WWW Document]. Statista. URL https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/ (accessed 3.11.17).

• Gottfried, J., Shearer, E., 2016. News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2016. Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project. (http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2016/)

• Knight, M., 2017. Social media as echo chamber: Facebook’s influence on news diversity. Rhodes Journalism Review (in production).

• Pew Research Center: Journalism & Media. (http://www.journalism.org/)