Facebook research: Encourages political discord[?]

Does Facebook – thanks to its “smart” algorithms – prevent its numerous users from being exposed to the opinions of completely different political beliefs, or does it instead encourage ideological and political isolation and polarization?

A new scientific study, which for the first time attempts to answer the question, gives a rather mediocre answer: Facebook probably maintains the dividing barriers, but the polarizing effect of its algorithms is not great and is certainly smaller than the users' own decisions about which news they will read and exchange on the social network.

The study, conducted by Facebook and University of Michigan researchers led by Dr. Solomon Messing and published in the leading scientific journal "Science", according to the BBC and the French Agency, analyzed data on 10.1 million users of the network, who had declared their political preferences in their "profile" (e.g. progressive/liberal or conservative).

The researchers found 226,000 news stories that had been shared by at least 20 users and assigned each story a political bias score, based on the stated political ideology of the most users who shared it. They then investigated how many stories of opposing political bias were available to each user.

According to the study, about 80% of an average Facebook user’s friends have similar political beliefs, while 20% belong to the other “camp.” These friends exchange news via the network, and this news tends to have a similar political “color.” In this way, only 29.5% of the news a user sees contains opposing political views. If the “filter” of friends did not intervene and a user had random access to posts on Facebook, then he would be exposed to the opposing view to a much greater extent, in the order of 40% to 45%.

After this first important “filter” of friends, Facebook itself “filters” which news each user sees, because its complex, confidential and controversial “social” algorithms intervene, which choose for themselves what they think the user would like to see. These algorithms reduce, albeit slightly (to 28.9%) - and certainly much less than the filter of friends - the percentage of political news of a different political ideology that a user. Ultimately, when the average user “clicks” to read news, only a quarter of it (24.9%) goes beyond his political-ideological sphere.

The initial conclusion – but further investigation is needed – is that social networks, such as Facebook, contribute with their “social” algorithms, but only slightly, to isolating a person from the point of view of the “other”. More importantly, however, they create communities of people with similar perceptions and thus “protect” them (with whatever positive or negative this has) from opposing views.

As Messing stated, the personal choices of each user count much more than the choices of the algorithm. What “makes the difference” is the choice of online friends. Facebook itself, commenting on the research, said that it shows that its users are exposed to a variety of opinions. “We found that most people have friends with opposing political ideologies and this is reflected in the news they exchange,” the network pointed out.

The big question, however, according to many analysts, is whether it is better for democracy to be informed about what is happening in the world through Facebook or directly through the various media outlets.

It is worth remembering that, as other studies have shown, people generally tend to read news from sources with which they agree politically, thus reinforcing their beliefs. The issue is that Facebook seems to further reinforce this process, mainly through the filter of friend selection and less through the filter of its algorithms.

Source: nooz