The complaints regarding “echo chambers” are repeatedly increasing from the social media users. Social media users are seriously facing the issue in which they repeatedly consume the contents and posts that are already holding large number of views. “Echo chambers” is a serious issue because of the fake news getting spread now and then. Most of the people in the world use social media regularly and if they repeatedly get fake news in their feeds, they would lose all the interest. Facebook has become the world’s biggest social media with “echo chamber”.
News content
Facebook has a great relationship with news content. As, it is for connecting and sharing photos, videos, articles, news, etc, most of the people have now become completely reliant on Facebook for latest news. The way news spreads or flows on social media is faster than any other communication medium. But, not all the news content that are displayed on our news feeds are true. The users can rely on different social media according to their choice and support the content if they trust the source.
Survey by “The Data Face”
“The Data Face”, a social media agency, conducted tests on people with different behavior and state of mind for political content. They conducted study on 1,400 people with different age-groups, behavior and state of mind. Each person was shown 8 videos from different sources. They were asked to decide the trustworthiness of the videos by watching them. Most of the viewers liked to watch non-political videos. Every user skipped videos from their viewpoint and were able to decide trustworthiness of the source. There was a difference in skipping of videos as people with different age-groups have different interests. But, most of the users were able to decide videos with credible source.
Reach of Social Media
Social medias are private companies that display the content according to their fixed algorithms and commercial interests. Each and every person on the world is now a social media user and hence social media has a global reach. As social media covers a large number of users across the world, there are large number of possibilities for fake news and content on it. Primarily, social media is not meant as a “news organization”, so the rules and regulations that apply over news organizations in different countries are not applicable on them. Also, large number of news content on it comes from third-party which are not overlooked by countries’ authorities. So, the content on social media is very uneven.
Echo Chamber
People on social media communicate mostly with their friends and family with whom they have some real-life relation. So, your feeds will mostly consist feeds from them. Also, if you are connected with people with some social, political, educational, location or any other interest, you will see feeds by them. Algorithms on social media works in a way that if you engage with posts, you will be filled with more such posts. Also, if you ignore some content, your feed gets narrower.
You will see less and less content that you don’t engage with and find interesting. This narrowing has created an echo chamber. The content on social media are from variety of sources. Each of them presents content from their perspective. You will find each source presenting articles from their own perspective.
In this case, reader must make his/her own decision to decide the trustworthiness of the source. Reader’s decision will lead him/her to content related to his/her perspective.
