Facebook users create their own "news bubble"

Facebook users who are more obsessed with news are likely to deal with a small number of news sources, the authors of the new study say.

What is the matter in the new study

It is a view of the architecture of social media polarization - essentially, how people can effectively cope with the sorting of opposing groups and filtering alternative opinions. Although Facebook uses algorithms that can recommend users content that they like, previous studies have shown that people's own choice of social networks has a stronger impact on the different kinds of opinions that these people see.

A new study, published March 6 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also indicates that the choice matters. The study focused on the activities of 376 million Facebook users between January 2010 and December 2015 and how they interacted with 920 different news agencies.

Tracking, huskies, reposts and comments on news stories posted on Facebook were analyzed by researchers led by Walter Kvatrachiochi from the Nuremberg School in Italy. They determined which sources of news people used and for how long.

The striking result of the study

The most amazing result was that, despite the huge number of news sources, from which you can choose, every Facebook user tended to focus on just a few pages. And the more active the user in terms of likes, reposts and comments, the more likely was that he focused his energy on fewer sources.

"There is a natural tendency among users to limit their activity to a certain set of pages," the scientists explain. "According to our data, when reading news on Facebook, the selective impact is dominant."

The researchers found that each person also viewed a limited number of news agencies. User activity was grouped within certain subsets of news organizations, and there was very little cross-reading between these subsets.

How does social media polarize?

According to Ben Schneiderman, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland who researches social media, this study, based on a large data set, is a useful addition to the research literature on the polarization of social media.

"This provides additional evidence to support the existence of the so-called bubble filter, or a shared way, through which people receive information," said Schneiderman, who did not participate in the new study.

Geographical distribution

However, researchers noted that users were more cosmopolitan than the news agencies themselves, at least geographically. That is, while information pages can be hugging each other's pages or sharing content, these networks were more geographically limited than user networks. Ordinary users, as a rule, interact with international pages, the researchers note.

Computer model

To see how these interactions with the user may arise, the researchers created a computer model in which people were given a predetermined opinion represented by a number on the line. The model reflected the tendency to raise the information with which you agree and collect information that defies your assumptions. The computer model imitates such a shift, indicating that pages that are too different from the individual's opinion will be rejected. This computer version of preconception confirmation led to a model similar to the one that actually exists on Facebook. This shows how the polarization of the social network can arise, say the researchers.

Fake News

This shift in confirmation by users can be a stumbling block for companies like Facebook or Google that are trying to eradicate so-called "fake news," the researchers note. The term "fake news" refers to completely false articles published by companies that seek to attract Facebook users to their web pages filled with advertising posts.

"News has the same dynamics of popularity as video kittens or selfies," the scientists write in their article. Moreover, the authors of the study note that political and social debates are based on conflicting narratives, and these narratives are resistant to strategies such as fact checking (although recent studies show that warning people to be on guard before they encounter false information, Can be effective).

People "form communities among friends, and their friends are closely connected with each other, but are weakly connected with people outside their community," said Schneiderman. "So if there is news that is spreading within their community, they tend to believe in it, but if it appears outside of such a community, it probably will not be known."