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Cape Town - Social network research reveals that people are more likely to be exposed to diverse views than previously thought.
Facebook on Thursday revealed a research study conducted on the giant social network that showed that people are exposed to diverse ideological views on the platform.
The research came about because it was widely believed people on Facebook experienced an ideological "echo chamber" where the only views they were exposed to were their own.
In a TED Talk on the topic in 2013, Eli Pariser said that Facebook had unilaterally edited conservative views from his Facebook news feed.
"I was kind of surprised when I notice one day that the conservatives had disappeared from my Facebook feed."
User action
Internet companies try to make the web more meaningful by localising and personalising content, but this may lead to unintentional censorship.
Twitter recently announced that it would block tweets in specific regions where governments or populations found them offensive or inappropriate.
"So Facebook isn't the only company doing invisible algorithmic editing of the web; Google's doing it too," Pariser said.
However, the Facebook research suggests that while personalisation is evident, it does not limit access to opposing political views.
"We found that people have friends who claim an opposing political ideology, and that the content in peoples' News Feeds reflect those diverse views," wrote study authors Eytan Bakshy, Solomon Messing and Lada Adamic on the Facebook blog.
They concede that user action plays a far greater role in determining what content is served than Facebook algorithms.
"While News Feed surfaces content that is slightly more aligned with an individual's own ideology (based on that person's actions on Facebook), who they friend and what content they click on are more consequential than the News Feed ranking in terms of how much diverse content they encounter."
Diverse media
The social research paper suggests that, on average 23% of people's friends on the network claim opposing ideology, 24.9% of hard news content that people click on cuts across ideological lines.
The results underscore how user action plays a significant role in what content people will see on their Facebook news feed.
"News Feed shows you all of the content shared by your friends, but the most relevant content is shown first. Exactly what stories people click on depends on how often they use Facebook, how far down they scroll in the News Feed, and the choices they make about what to read," says the study.
"Results show that exposure to a variety of media outlets predicts to some extent the reception of diverse ideas, especially for citizens with lower education. But interest and knowledge are better predictors. This indicates that policies that favour a diverse supply are necessary but not sufficient," wrote Richard van der Wurff of the Amsterdam School of Communication Research ASCoR on the need to promote diverse media policy.
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