President Obama meets Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP/Press Association Images. All rights reservedFacebook has ruined journalism. In May 2016 an American newspaper proved it. As politics on either side of the Atlantic span out of control, unnoticed by most, the Wall Street Journal laid bare one of the greatest problems of the social media age. Hidden away in a corner of The Journal’s website, a little graphic named Red Feed, Blue Feed showed us just what happens when Facebook becomes the primary source of news.
Take any issue, perhaps gun politics, and The Journal will show how a conservative Facebook user gets an impassioned defence of gun rights, at the same time as a liberal user is told how necessary gun control is. With one graphic, the newspaper illustrated a problem a select few journalists and academics have spent years worrying about: the ‘filter bubble’.
The term itself is a relatively new one. Designed to highlight how personalised feeds increasingly ensure we live in an echo chamber of ideas and opinions we already agree with, Eli Pariser could probably claim to have coined the term in his book and TED talk of the same name in 2011. Though still fairly obscure, as Guardian editor Katharine Viner’s recent piece showed, filter bubbles are just about starting to enter into mainstream consciousness. Invariably that consciousness is limited to those involved in the media, those who write about it, or those who profess to care about its future.
