Yui Mok PA Archive/PA Images. All rights reserved.In the aftermath of the US presidential election that seemed to shock at least half the country, many liberals are asking themselves how they missed the popularity of Donald Trump. The ‘remain’ campaign for the UK’s shocking Brexit vote are also asking themselves how the other side won. One possible answer lies in a concept known as “the filter bubble”: the idea that personalisation tools from companies like Facebook and Google are isolating us from opposing viewpoints, leading different parties to feel like they occupy separate realities. The theory argues that this in turn decreases the quality of information and as a consequence, civic discourse and democracy is undermined.
To investigate this theory, Facebook conducted a study in 2015, and its findings show that exposure to diverse content is suppressed by Facebook’s algorithm by 8% for self-identified liberals, and by 5% for self-identified conservatives. As critics argue, this proves that users see fewer news items on Facebook that they disagree with which are shared by their friends, because the algorithm is not showing them.
