Do you take pride in your diverse group of friends online with different backgrounds and varied viewpoints? Well, Facebook researchers say they may not actually be as diverse as you think.
According to a study published in Science magazine — and conducted by engineers who work at Facebook — users cull their news feeds to better align with personal beliefs, overriding the social network’s algorithm designed to vary posts.
Looking at more than 10 million openly and politically partisan users over six months, Facebook found users are to blame for the lack of opinion diversity in news feeds, not the site’s algorithm. The report states that Facebook’s algorithm filters out incompatible opinions less than 10 percent of the time — about 8 percent for those who identify as liberal, and 5 percent for conservatives.
“In the end, we find individual choices, both in terms of who they choose to be friends with and what they select, matters more than the effect of algorithmic sorting,” said Facebook researcher and study coauthor Eytan Bakshy.
Facebook and other social media platforms have been criticized for creating echo chambers of opinions, where users seldom encounter conflicting opinions from their online circles. That echo chamber was thought to be created with the help of search engine algorithms like that of Google that tweak results to better fit what users want. In spite of agreeing the study’s findings support earlier theories on how a limited number of opinions are shared and then reinforced, critics of the study say it had some flaws.
For example, the study’s focus on users who self-identify with a political affiliation are likely going to behave differently than those who don’t — most users don’t list their ideologies. Researchers also only looked at American users over age 18 who were very active on the site, logging in most days of the week. Moreover, the study only considered users who clicked or shared at least one news link between July and December 2014, then analyzed those interactions, which were based on already filtered results.
David Lazer, a computer science professor at Northeastern University, critiqued the study in his own Science column for a different reason, wondering if use of the filtering algorithm made social networks less democratic.
“It is plausible, however, that friends that Facebook infers you to care about also tend to be more ideologically aligned with you as well, accentuating the filtering effect,” Lazer said. “Open questions include whether the curation privileges some voices over others, and whether certain types of subjects are highlighted by the curation in a way that systematically undermines discussions of the issues of the day.”
Facebook has also previously admitted to tinkering with people’s news feeds in the pursuit of studying people’s emotions, in what some allege is a violation of the law.