Fleeting Note (FN): the creation of Fediverse-based alternatives might suddenly become an urgency.

Summary of peer-reviewed research - “Understanding Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles: The Impact of Social Media on Diversification and Partisan Shifts in News Consumption” - by its authors, who found:more time spent on Facebook, the more polarized their online news consumption becomes...Facebook usage is five times more polarizing for conservative…

echo chambers and epistemic bubbles... systematically exclude sources of information... exaggerate their members’ confidence in their beliefs... work in entirely different ways... epistemic bubble is when you don’t hear people from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trust people from the other side...‘epistemic bubble’ …

This month sees the first generation of Hubs (other than mine) go live, so it’s time to imagine what comes next: AI integration? Filter-bubble Piercers? HubBots? Factcheck-driven credibility scores?

echo chambers and filter bubbles are slightly different... echo chambers could be a result of filtering or ... other processes, but filter bubbles have to be the result of algorithmic filtering...people main source of news roughly equal ... online and television... TV is more likely... people over 45. People under 45 are more likely to get their n…

In the US, radio began as a free-market free-for-all. More than five hundred radio stations sprang up in less than a decade to explore the possibilities... 40 percent were noncommercial... network of interlinked stations playing local and national content supported by local and national advertising, became dominant players...Soviet Union... ideolo…

How fake news gets into our minds, and what you can do to resist it... to understand why it gets into our mind... by examining how memory works and how memories become distorted.... Fake news often relies on misattribution ... we retrieve things from memory but can’t remember their source... one of the reasons advertising is so effective... Repe…

report reviews and summarises the recent available literature connecting polarisation and the news media...key findings...: little evidence that increased exposure to news featuring like-minded or opposing views leads to the widespread polarisation of attitudes... some studies found both can strengthen attitudes of minority who already hold stron…

reddit community called Change My View ... a ready-made natural experiment ... feed it into programs ... to understand the back-and-forth between human beings ... discovered two things: what kind of arguments are most likely to change people’s minds, and what kinds of minds are most likely to be changed. https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/ : po…

societies have experienced extremism and fragmentation without the assistance of Silicon Valley for centuries... So just how responsible is the internet for today’s divisions? In this Twitter map... of the US political landscape, accounts that follow one another are clustered together, and they are color-coded by the kinds of content they commonly…

Technology has altered the foundations of news and media, and as trust in media continues to decline, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and algorithms have come to play a critical role not only as threats to the integrity and quality of media, but also as a source of potential solutions. The core threats to information quality associated …

Over the coming years, we’ll see the BBC develop and roll-out more and more machine learning algorithms for storing, retrieving, tagging and possibly even creating content.... What if we lock our audiences in to what they just want to hear, never challenging them? ... Should the algorithms we use be open to public scrutiny?... inform our own thin…

we evolved to solve complex problems not independently but dependently in a group setting.... the knowledge illusion... much of our “knowledge” is not knowledge in the sense of understanding how things work but ... faith... in other people  -... smart people with PhDs... whatever  -  who I trust to know these things that I do not know.... for tho…

“We wanted democracy... but got mobocracy.”... Bots generated one out of every five political messages posted on Twitter in America’s presidential campaign last year... “we need to reform our attention economy.”... groups which had mostly been excluded from the mainstream media... developed the dark arts they would use to further their agendas..…

small experiments aimed at customizing that story selection to the individual reader, based on a variety of signals... where readers are located... the last time a reader visits the site. If,... publishes a particularly enterprising story on a Monday, but a reader doesn’t visit ... after that story has left the homepage ... personalize the user’s…

Our findings confirm the existence of echo chambers where users interact primarily with either conspiracy-like or scientific pages.... Only few conspiracy users engage with corrections and their liking and commenting rates on conspiracy posts increases after the interaction.

our analysis shows that social media use is clearly associated with incidental exposure to additional sources of news ... with more politically diverse news diets... The algorithms, of course, continually change... More sources does not necessarily mean more diverse... the majority in most countries and in most groups do not use sources from a…

Fighting people with facts only makes them cling to their beliefs more strongly, further polarising our damaged societies. Different tactics are needed, and they start closer to home than you think.

Pariser’s work has led him to believe that blaming fake news for fractured discourse is a red herring... The filter bubble explains a lot about how liberals didn’t see Trump coming, but not very much about how he won the election... my guess is that talk-radio, local news, and Fox are a much more important piece of that story than random conservat…

In the United States... the chances that two people visiting the same news site have different political views is about 45 percent... the internet is far closer to perfect desegregation than perfect segregation... you are more likely to come across someone with opposing views online than you are offline... a surprising amount of the information …

Groupthink produced a failure of the “wisdom of crowds” and an underestimate of Trump’s chances... political experts aren’t a very diverse group and tend to place a lot of faith in the opinions of other experts and other members of the political establishment. Once a consensus view is established, it tends to reinforce itself ... Social media, esp…

uses machine learning to give readers a stream of 25 stories they might be interested in based on their preferences, but 'always including an element of surprise'... personalisation will be based on the meaning of an article... users' existing history that shows roughly what type of stories they are interested in

to put the blame solely on the company is to overlook how people use the site, and how they themselves create a filter bubble effect through their actions.... Just as important as the algorithm is how people use the site and shape it around their own communications... people are actually exposed to a great deal of diversity through Facebook... But…

AllSides.com offers the news you’d expect on any US politics site, except that its lead stories include a choice of articles: one from the left, centre and right... to push the comfortably certain in new directions... When you click on one story you’re offered a range of alternatives... a patented ‘crowd-driven’ political bias rating. Visitors ..…

To some liberals, Donald Trump’s inauguration portends doom... to many conservatives, it’s a crowning moment ... as if each side is living in ... a different reality.... information avoidance... all of us ... ward off any new information that makes us feel bad, obligates us to do something we don’t want to do or challenges our worldview... we’re …

when I saw the potential of the Internet, I thought it would be solved. The web would allow us to come together, not just across the world, but across the park, across racial lines, across our many divides... everything turned upside down. The open communication network we thought we were building turned into a hunting ground for trolls and spamme…

the liberal critiques I read weren’t so much attacking my decision as they were questioning my intelligence and my ability to understand the issue... I was on the outside of the so-called liberal bubble... what I saw was not pretty... contempt and arrogance, and an offensive air of intellectual superiority... incapable of talking with those who …

A work in progress from an upcoming eponymous post. Another experiment with the enewsletter format: some initial thoughts on this seemingly intractable problem, with some of the source materials I’m studying.

Echo chambers aren’t just a product of the internet and social media, however, but of how those things interact with fundamental features of human nature... Understand these features of human nature and maybe we can think creatively about ways to escape them... our tendency to associate with people like us. Sociologists call this homophily.... t…

image... apparently shows the spread of radiation from the Fukushima nuclear accident... being shared widely ... despite the fact that it... shows the wave height of the tsunami... you might want to doublecheck before hitting Share... here’s how