The Facebook Feed of the Mind

A couple of months ago, not long before the parliamentary elections in the UK, my wife made an interesting observation. "Based on my Facebook feed," she pointed out, "Labour are going to win this election by a landslide." When I looked through her feed, I could see what she meant. Not only were there numerous posts and re-posts of news stories and blogs about how the UK was swinging back towards the left, even the ads and promoted stories seemed to indicate a new tide coming in British politics. Knowing a thing or two about confirmation bias and the nature of social media, I remained unconvinced. When the election actually happened and the Conservatives regained a majority that seemed to catch many of the major news outlets (and pretty much all of her friends on Facebook) completely by surprise, my suspicions were confirmed. The problem with going to Facebook to see which way the winds of change are blowing is that your preferences determine the direction of the wind. Without pretending to know anything about the details of how Facebook filters its news feeds, it's pretty clear that each time you 'Like' a post, you get to see more posts like the one you clicked on and less posts unlike it. Programs like Pandora and Stumble Upon use a similar algorithm to help users design their perfect radio stations that only play songs they really like and only see websites that reflect their personal interests. So in effect, social media very effectively narrows our reality tunnels by...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news