By Adam Wakefield

Before we dive into what Trump’s victory means for journalism, it is important to discuss what is meant by the ‘filter bubble’, and the proliferation of fake news on social media platforms.

The filter bubble, a term which was brought to prominence by author Eli Pariser, and the subject of a TED Talk he gave in March 2011, is social media platforms and search engines tailoring the information their users receive to align to their own world views. The result is that you are not exposed to information that can challenge your position or broaden your view.

Facebook is doing it, Google is doing it, and Pariser says, “You don’t decide what gets in and more importantly, you don’t actually see what gets edited out.”

Instead of a balanced information diet, you can end up surrounded by “information junk food”. Algorithms do not have embedded ethics and, according to Pariser, you cannot have a functioning democracy if citizens are not receiving a good flow of information.

Fake news, as we discussed on media update on 21 November, spread considerably in the months leading up to the US election. A number of media commentators argue that fake articles garnering hundreds of thousands of shares, and their effect, cannot be ignored.

With the election having passed, much introspection has taken place with Joshua Benton, a director at Nieman Lab, arguing that the forces that drove the media’s failure over the course of the election are likely to get worse, not better.

Initially a sceptic of filter bubbles, Benton says, “I’ve come to think that the rise of fake news — and of the cheap-to-run, ideologically driven aggregator sites that are only a few steps up from fake — has weaponised those filter bubbles.”

“There were just too many people voting in this election because they were infuriated by made-up things they read online.”

While unsure of what the right solution is, Benton knows that getting Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to care about the problem is “absolutely key to the health of our information ecosystem”.

Zuckerberg himself has since stated that Facebook is serious about stopping the spread of misinformation across the network. “We’ve made significant progress, but there is more work to be done.”

What drives people to seek out their own views?

So, with a characteristic of filter bubbles being the inclusion of agreed-to views, and the exclusion of others, what drives people into these shells?

According to Dr Sumayya Ebrahim, a lecturer in the University of Johannesburg’s psychology department and whose academic interests include critical psychology, identity and well-being, the inherent desire to belong “is arguably as old as humankind and much of what fuels and motivates human behaviour and particularly an affinity to a particular view point, is the desire to belong”. 

“Not belonging can sometimes mean that one’s social status may be relegated to belonging to the ‘other’. The drive to seek out views akin to one’s own can also be understood as what is termed in psychology as identification,” Ebrahim says.

The seeking out of views that align with one’s own views reinforces a sense of identification with a particular view. Moreover, as Ebrahim explains, as one’s sense of self melds with the identity that a particular group forms, the psychological boundaries between an individual and the group become blurred, which may urge people to seek out their own views.

“Football hooliganism is an example of this,” Ebrahim says. 

What does this mean for the journalism industry?

As the effects of the filter bubble play out in the media, politics, and social media, what does this mean for the industry itself, and its survival, if anything?

According to Dion Chang, founder of business and consumer trends consultancy Flux Trends, what’s happening within the broadcast media is an example of the filter bubble at play, with Fox News and CNN in America, and locally, eNCA and ANN7 being examples of ideological splits.

As a curious individual, Chang flips between eNCA and ANN7 if they are both covering the same issue, as to glean different perspectives, but he believes he falls into the minority who do so. Most people have their sources of information and stick to them.

For the media companies, instead of suffering from the filter bubble, they are possibly benefitting. Ultimately, the more subscribers they are able to reach, the better it is for them, even if it means appealing to one audience segment over another.

“You need to do that and try and keep those people as much as possible in that corral. Once people are in there, I don’t think there is much of an out. It might be a good thing for media companies but a negative for political perspective and other things,” he says.

“You become polarised into a camp and then you can’t have a Sunday lunch and can’t discuss politics. It will have a subtle but not insignificant under current in social interactions. It’s interesting and sad at the same time.”

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Image courtesy of Gisela Giadino under this license.