Social media increasingly divides us — here’s how to escape

Story: October Yates

Photo: Kjell Redal

Walk across any university campus today and you’ll see hundreds of students with their eyes locked on their smartphones, gobbling up media and spitting it back out for their own personal audience.

The worldwide web is shrinking as the Internet and social media platforms mold themselves to fit everyone’s individual, online profile. In the swift-moving river of information, social media users are trapped in whirlpools of like-minded ideas.

We’ve all heard of the social media “bubble” or “echo chamber,” but what is it exactly, and how does it affect us and our views?

This bubble decides what pops up in your feed as you scroll through any given social media site.

It depends on where you live, how much money you make, your political stance and what you like — everyone’s feed is different.

Dr. Todd Donovan, a professor of political science at Western, explains this dynamic in its non-digital manifestation.

“People that settle in urban areas self-select a kind of lifestyle. They live with similar people. People who live in rural areas also self-select that,” Donovan says.

The same “self-selection” applies to the online world as well. People will visit or “live” on certain sites, interacting with certain people who generally view the world in the same way they do.

Approximately 69 percent of U.S. adults use some form of social media, according to Pew Research Center. The majority of Americans, at 68 percent, use Facebook, followed by Instagram at 28 percent. Of those percentages, most Facebook and Instagram users will use the sites everyday.

Today, most social media uses some form of algorithm to select content for each user — based on their search history, location and many other factors. The algorithm used is known as a “recommender system,” which curates social media feeds.

Dr. Brian Hutchinson is a computer science professor at Western. His research specializes in machine learning.

“There is this idea called collaborative filtering and its one of the most popular ways that recommender systems work. They aggregate the behavior of like-minded users in order to make recommendations for you,” Hutchinson says. “In the case of Netflix, they say ‘Oh, these other 10 users who seem to very highly agree with you in how they rate things really love this movie you haven’t rated, so maybe we should recommend this movie to you.’”

In some cases recommender systems are too effective, leading to an echo chamber of information or filter bubble, Hutchinson says. Posts and news stories that represent a certain user’s views and opinions are displayed back to them with little input from the opposition.

“Media, generally, is all about self-selecting what you want to hear, what you want to follow and the news stories that confirm what your preferences and beliefs are,” Donovan says. “Broadcast media has shown this for years. We believe certain outlets, dismiss others and only consume outlets that are consistent with our preexisting beliefs; everybody is increasingly living in these little media cocoons.”

Platforms like Facebook have research teams dedicated to analyzing their users’ information and building their sites around what their viewers want.

“That’s all logic that’s based in the back,” Hutchinson says. “[Companies] use the massive quantities of data they have to find patterns to make predictions about what you will and won’t like, or what is and what is not in agreement with what you believe.”

Research by Stanford University and Pew Research Center on political polarization shows that gaining a broader scope of opinions and beliefs is a positive thing for our personal growth and society. For major corporations though, that can be problematic.

“It’s risky for companies, if people see recommendations that they don’t agree with or believe in then they might blame the tool or platform,” Hutchinson says. “I think it’s a valuable thing to expose more diversity of ideas to more communities, but it can be risky.”

Bellingham, and Western in particular, have a reputation for being a liberal epicenter in Whatcom County. Within the county, 55 percent of registered voters voted for Hillary Clinton, while 37 percent voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. General Election.

Using what we know about website algorithms and social media, we can examine what exactly makes up the bubble around Bellingham.

For example, using Twitter’s advanced search options, if you search for the name “Trump,” set your location to Bellingham, and set the date range between Jan. 19 to Jan. 21, 2017 — the inauguration of Donald Trump — there were zero positive responses, 15 negative responses and 21 neutral responses. Neutral, in this case, means tweets that contained the word “Trump”

without a political opinion.

These analytics, along with 2016 election statistics, suggest a majority of Twitter users in Bellingham view President Donald Trump negatively or remain neutral.

But a more pointed analysis of political web geographies can be found in a 2015 paper published in the journal Science.

Facebook researchers anonymously tracked 10.1 million of the site’s users for six months. Based on the selected users self-defined political leanings — they chose between very liberal, liberal, neutral, conservative or very conservative — the researchers tracked which media outlets a political group was more likely to share information from.

The correlation was striking enough that The Wall Street Journal created a graphic in which users can track a typical “red feed” or “blue feed” which gives them spun news regarding any certain topic including ISIS, guns, Trump, abortion and more.

Using this information, Facebook can then prioritize which outlets a politicized user is more likely to interact with, whether that’s by sharing, liking, or commenting.

Evona Cole, senior and environmental science major at Western, says she sees a problem with this. She finds importance in having her views challenged rather than reinforced on social media.

“I am a victim of that,” Cole says. “I get around the same opinions being a part of the Young Democrats of Whatcom County. The only republicans I know are my parents, so when I get backlash, it’s from phone calls with them, not really over social media. I like to be opposed, not in a violent way of course, but seeing more than one perspective is useful to understand society and how people work.”.

Donovan thinks there is an option for finding more balanced information though.

“With social media, it’s hard. It used to be, when there were just three networks and a couple of major newspapers, that they at least pretended to be neutral and there wasn’t space to specialize in an ideological niche,” Donovan says. He suggests citizens “rely on foreign media rather than American media because they don’t necessarily have the same profit motive to show sensational things.”