[Air-L] Questioning the filter bubble

Sun Apr 2 15:22:01 PDT 2017

Hello David,

Already some great suggestions. Below is a broad list of papers that
discuss both sides of the broad topic of filter bubbles and polarization. I
think it is a good addition to the above list by Alex, since these dont
deal with fake news, necessarily.

1. If you are looking for *work specifically that questions the bubble*,
here are a few (in chronological order).

------------------------------------------------------

Baldassarri, D., & Bearman, P. (2007). Dynamics of political
polarization. American
Sociological Review, 72, 784–811.

David Weinberger. Echo Chambers = Democracy. In A Fine, M Sifry, A Rasiej,
and J Levy, editors, Rebooting America, pages 32–37. Personal Democracy
Press, New York, 2008. (argues that; 1) the Internet is too young to make
conclusions about filter bubbles; 2) the empirical research that exists is
very difficult to interpret; 3) fragmentation occurs in traditional media
and in offline world; 4) democracy needs bubbles so that people in basic
agreement can build relationships and be active in political movements.)

Wojcieszak, M. E. and D. C. Mutz (2009). “Online Groups and Political
Discourse: Do Online Discussion Spaces Facilitate Exposure to Political
Disagreement?” In: Journal of Communication

Brundidge, J. (2010). “Encountering ”Difference” in the contemporary public
sphere: The
contribution of the internet to the heterogeneity of political discussion
networks”. In:
Journal of Communication (internet facilitates communication)

Kim, Y. (2011b). “The contribution of social network sites to exposure to
political difference:
The relationships among SNSs, online political messaging, and exposure to
cross-cutting perspectives”. In: Computers in Human Behavior

IDEOLOGICAL SEGREGATION ONLINE AND OFFLINE, MATTHEW GENTZKOW AND JESSE M.
SHAPIRO (2011) (We find no evidence that the Internet is becoming more
segregated over time.)

Jacob Weisberg. Bubble Trouble Is Web personalization turning us into
solipsistic twits?, 2011. URL http://goo.gl/ET1pO6 (paper from google
saying web personalization is not responsible for bubbles)

Kim, Y., Hsu, S.-H., & de Zúñiga, H. G. (2013). Influence of social media
use on discussion network heterogeneity and civic engagement: The
moderating role of personality traits. Journal of Communication, 63(3),
498–516

Michael a. Beam and Gerald M. Kosicki. Personalized News Portals: Filtering
Systems and Increased News Exposure. Journalism & Mass Communication
Quarterly, 91(1):59–77, 2014. (investigated the impact of personalized news
web portals on political bias and found out the average news viewer seems
to favor news that does not have bias towards a particular perspective.)

The digital citizen: in worship of an echo (2014)
https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/366752/

Messing, S., & Westwood, S. J. (2014). Selective exposure in the age of
social media: Endorsements trump partisan source affiliation when selecting
news online. Communication Research, 41(8), 1042–1063.

Barberá, P., Jost, J. T., Nagler, J., Tucker, J. A., & Bonneau, R. (2015).
Tweeting from left to right: Is online political communication more than an
echo chamber? Psychological Science,

Pablo Barbera. How Social Media Reduces Mass Political Polarization.
Evidence from Germany, Spain, and the U.S. 2014 (found out that social
media users receive information from a set of diverse sources, thanks to
weak ties)

FILTER BUBBLES, ECHO CHAMBERS, AND ONLINE NEWS CONSUMPTION (show that
there’s no preferential media consumption) https://5harad.com/papers/
bubbles.pdf

Bakshy, E., S. Messing, and L. Adamic (2015). “Exposure to ideologically
diverse news
and opinion on Facebook”. In: Science (argue that facebook facilitates
ideologically diverse exposure)

Kieron O’Hara and David Stevens (2015). Echo Chambers and Online Radicalism
: Assessing the Internet’ s Complicity in Violent Extremism. Policy and
Internet (argue that the evidence for bubbles is not strong enough for
regulation and even if bubbles exist, users can escape them. Since users
can live in looser and multiple networks (often thanks to social media),
they have flexibility, choice and exposure to heterogeneous points of view.)

Bright, J. (2016). “The Social News Gap: How News Reading and News Sharing
Diverge”. In: Journal of Communication (argues something similar to the
above, that social media facilitates diverse exposure)

Bode, L. (2016). Who sees what? Individual exposure to political
information via social media. In G. W. Richardson (Ed.), Social media and
politics: A new way to participate in the political process. Santa Barbara,
CA: Praeger.

IS THE INTERNET CAUSING POLITICAL POLARIZATION? EVIDENCE FROM DEMOGRAPHICS
(2017)

http://www.nber.org/papers/w23258.pdf (they show that polarization is
increasing for the older demographic, who generally don’t use the internet)

------------------------------------------------------

*2. Here are a few that support the existence of the bubble:*

Slater, M. D. (2007). Reinforcing spirals:  The mutual influence of media
selectivity and media effects and their impact on individual behavior and
social identity. Communication  theory, (it is a spiral effect)

McCarty, N. M., Poole, K. T., & Rosenthal, H. (2008). Polarized America:
The dance of ideology and unequal riches. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
(economic inequality and polarization are linked)

Stroud, N. J. (2008). Media use and political predispositions: Revisiting
the concept of selective exposure. Political Behavior, 30(3), 341–366.

Iyengar, S., & Hahn, K. S. (2009). Red media, blue media: Evidence of
ideological selectivity in media use. Journal of Communication, 59

Levendusky, M. (2009). The partisan sort: How liberals became Democrats and
conservatives became Republicans. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Lawrence, E., Sides, J., & Farrell, H. (2010). Self-segregation or
deliberation? Blog readership, participation, and polarization in American
politics. Perspectives on Politics, 8(1), 141–157. (social media leading to
polarization)

Abramowitz, A. I. (2011). The disappearing center: Engaged citizens,
polarization, and American democracy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Stroud, N. J. (2011). Niche news: The politics of news choice. New York,
NY: Oxford University Press (claim that polarization is due to media
balkanization)

Gentzkow, M., & Shapiro, J. M. (2011). Ideological segregation online and
offline. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 44, 1–41.  (both media and
personal choice responsible for polarization)

Iyengar, S., Sood, G., & Lelkes, Y. (2012). Affect, not ideology: A social
identity perspective on polarization. Public Opinion Quarterly, 76(3),
405–431.

Murray, C. (2013). Coming apart: The state of white America, 1960–2010. New
York, NY: Crown Forum

Arceneaux, K., & Johnson, M. (2013). Changing minds or changing channels?
Partisan news in an age of choice. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press. (“Balkanization of media consumption”)

Levendusky, M. (2013). How partisan media polarize America. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press. (claim that polarization is due to media
balkanization)

Arceneaux, K., & Johnson, M. (2013). Changing minds or changing channels?
Partisan news in an age of choice. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press
(claim that polarization is due to public choice and not media)

Prior, M. (2013). Media and political polarization. Annual Review of
Political Science, 16, 101–127. (both media and personal choice responsible
for polarization)

Himelboim, I., McCreery, S., & Smith, M. (2013). Birds of a feather tweet
together: Integrating network and content analyses to examine
cross-ideology exposure on Twitter. Journal of Computer-Mediated
Communication, 18(2), (social media leading to polarization)

Abramowitz, A. I. (2014). Partisan nation: The rise of affective
partisanship in the American electorate.

>From “information” to “knowing”: Exploring the role of social media in
contemporary news consumption (2014) (found out that especially those who
have a small network on Facebook are vulnerable to the filter bubble effect
(in terms of news consumption).)

Edgerly, S. (2015). Red media, blue media, and purple media: News
repertoires in the colorful media landscape. Journal of Broadcasting &
Electronic Media, 59, 1–21. (claim that polarization is due to public
choice and not media)

Nikolov D, Oliveira DFM, Flammini A, Menczer F. (2015) Measuring online
social bubbles. PeerJ Computer Science (studied 4 years of communication
data in a university network and found out that social media exposes the
community to a narrower range of information sources)

“Media Choice and Moderation: Evidence from Online Tracking Data” (2016)
(Overall, the findings support a view that if online “echo chambers” exist,
they are a reality for only very few people who drive the traffic and
priorities of the most partisan outlets.)

------------------------------------------------------

Sorry for dumping this unorganized list here. I hope some of it is still
helpful. We are in the process of preparing a tutorial on this subject. I
can provide you with a much more well formatted list of references/summary
in a month or so, if that is still of interest.

Regards,
Kiran Garimella,
PhD student
Aalto University
https://users.ics.aalto.fi/kiran/

On Sun, Apr 2, 2017 at 11:10 PM, Sarah Ann Oates <soates at umd.edu> wrote:

> Wow. More evidence that AoIR is worth a thousand lit reviews :)
>
> On Sun, Apr 2, 2017 at 1:44 PM, Alex Leavitt <alexleavitt at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > First:
> >
> > An overview of the #fakenews conference at Harvard Law earlier this year:
> > https://news.northeastern.edu/2017/02/the-fake-news-
> > phenomenon-how-it-spreads-and-how-to-fight-it/
> >
> > Some suggestions:
> >
> > Media Choice and Moderation:Evidence from Online Tracking Data. Andrew
> > Guess, 2016. https://www.dropbox.com/s/uk005hhio3dysm8/GuessJMP.pdf?dl=0
> > and coverage by Brendan Nyhan (who also does work in this area):
> > https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/08/upshot/relatively-few-
> > people-are-partisan-news-consumers-but-theyre-influential.html
> >
> > Yochai Benkler's 2017 research report:
> > http://www.npr.org/2017/03/14/520087884/researchers-examine-
> > breitbart-s-influence-on-misleading-information
> >
> > Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook. Bakshy,
> > Messing, & Adamic, 2015. Science.
> > http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2015/05/06/
> > science.aaa1160.full
> >
> > Guess, Andrew M. 2015. Measure for measure: an experimental test of
> online
> > political media exposure. Political Analysis 23(1): 59-75.
> > https://academic.oup.com/pan/article-abstract/23/1/59/
> > 1448909/Measure-for-Measure-An-Experimental-Test-of-Online
> >
> > People trust news based on who shared it, not on who published it
> > http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/03/avoiding-articles-from-the-
> > creep-people-trust-news-based-on-who-shared-it-not-on-who-published-it/
> > --> (2016:
> > http://www.mediainsight.org/Pages/a-new-understanding-
> > what-makes-people-trust-and-rely-on-news.aspx
> > )
> >
> > Selective exposure in the age of social media: Endorsements trump
> partisan
> > source affiliation when selecting news online. Messing & Westwood, 2014,
> > Communication Research.
> > https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Solomon_Messing/
> > publication/235763723_Selective_Exposure_in_the_Age_
> > of_Social_Media_Endorsements_Trump_Partisan_Source_
> > Affiliation_When_Selecting_News_Online/links/
> 0fcfd5134c3eb42dd5000000.pdf
> >
> > Also related:
> >
> > Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election. Allcott & Gentzkow,
> 2017.
> > https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf
> >
> > Kate Starbird, @ University of Washington:
> > https://medium.com/hci-design-at-uw/information-wars-a-
> > window-into-the-alternative-media-ecosystem-a1347f32fd8f
> >
> >
> > ---
> >
> > Alex Leavitt, Ph.D.
> > Quantitative UX Researcher, Facebook Research
> > http://alexleavitt.com
> > Twitter: @alexleavitt <http://twitter.com/alexleavitt>
> >
> >
> > On Sun, Apr 2, 2017 at 10:00 AM, Miguel, Cristina <
> > C.Miguel at leedsbeckett.ac.uk> wrote:
> >
> > > Hi David,
> > >
> > > Flaxman et al. have another interesting paper about filter bubbles in
> > > relation to news consumption:
> > >
> > > Flaxman, S., Goel, S., & Rao, J. (2016). Filter bubbles, echo chambers,
> > > and online news consumption. Public Opinion Quarterly, 15(3), 209-227.
> > > Chicago.
> > >
> > > Also check:
> > >
> > > Bozdag, E. (2013). Bias in algorithmic filtering and personalization.
> > > Ethics and Information Technology, 15(3), 209-227.
> > >
> > >
> > > My 2 cents!
> > >
> > >
> > > Best wishes,
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Dr. Cristina Miguel
> > > Senior Lecturer
> > > Business School
> > > Leeds Beckett University
> > > https://leedsbeckett.academia.edu/CristinaMiguel
> > >
> > >
> > > ________________________________________
> > > From: Air-L <air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org> on behalf of David
> Brake <
> > > davidbrake at gmail.com>
> > > Sent: 02 April 2017 15:35
> > > To: AoIR mailing list
> > > Subject: [Air-L] Questioning the filter bubble
> > >
> > > Dear all,
> > >
> > > I’ve asked my students what they’d like to learn about I have not
> already
> > > covered and several of them have been asking about filter bubbles in
> > social
> > > media and virtual communities. What do people recommend these days for
> up
> > > to date discussion of filter bubbles? In particular arguments on *both*
> > > sides. Here are two skeptical pieces I found about the filter bubble
> > effect
> > > FYI
> > >
> > > Flaxman, S., Goel, S., & Rao, J. M. (2013). Ideological segregation and
> > > the effects of social media on news consumption. Retrieved from
> > > http://www.justinmrao.com/bubbles.pdf
> > > Gentzkow, M., & Shapiro, J. M. (2011). Ideological Segregation Online
> and
> > > Offline. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 126(4), 1799-1839.
> Retrieved
> > > from http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/126/4/1799.abstract
> > >
> > >
> > > --
> > > Dr David Brake, Researcher and Educator http://davidbrake.org/,
> @drbrake
> > > Author of "Sharing Our Lives Online: Risks and Exposure in Social
> Media”
> > > https://www.facebook.com/sharingourlivesonline <
> > https://www.facebook.com/
> > > sharingourlivesonline>
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>
> --
> Sarah Oates
> Professor and Senior Scholar
> Philip Merrill College of Journalism
> University of Maryland
> College Park, MD 20457
> Email: soates at umd.edu
> Phone: 301 405 4510
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-- 

--
Kiran