Facebook really gets a bad rep these days. There’s the news that it won’t fact check politicians or paid advertisers, including political advertising, and remove those that are fake. Their algorithms make this discussion even more prominent by predicting which stories it thinks you’ll click on and putting them at the top of your feed, making it more visible to you.
As exemplified in Saslow’s “‘Nothing on this page is real’: How lies become truth in online America”, the more extreme a post is, the more comments and likes it gets, and the more it is seen by others. The result is that political extremes are more likely to show up on your feed — true or false. Not only is this because of a technical bias stemming from an algorithm that only shows you what you want to see, but it also is due to an emergent bias based on what people choose to share to their newsfeed (Brey 2010). Facebook is just doing what it thinks you want it to do.
So what can you do to outsmart Facebook’s biased algorithm? The first step is to become more aware of what your own newsfeed looks like. One app that I have used before called PolitEcho will analyze your newsfeed and tell you which friends lean which way based on their “Likes”, and just how influential they are on your own newsfeed. It will describe the makeup of your newsfeed and how much it leans one way. If your newsfeed is mostly on one end of the political spectrum, you could reconsider who your Facebook friends are and if they are really who you want to be getting your news from.
Sometimes Fox News articles will occasionally pop up on my radar, and there are actually a few that accurately report the subject. I remember seeing someone online say that they’ll link those sorts of articles to their right-wing friends when those people cry fake news. I really like the way you tied in the Saslow article and the PolitEcho app to the idea of the information bubble. That does a good job of highlighting where left-wing readers fall into it as well.
ReplyDeleteThe only problem I have is that I feel like your blog post ended without a proper concluding sentence. Other than that, this blog post is good! It just needs a bit of expansion at the end.
With all of the controversy surrounding politics and political news on the internet, I think the topic of your article is an incredibly relevant one. Your article does an excellent job at calling its audience to action, I personally now plan on trying out the app you mentioned. One area you could possibly improve on, however, is in your discussion of class material. I think that introducing Saslow's work a bit earlier on would allow you to incorporate it more thoroughly throughout the remainder of your blog post. Overall, I think your blog is very relevant and engaging, and could use just a bit more discussion of course material.
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