Slate’s Farhad Manjoo has a very interesting piece this week about a new study from a researcher at Facebook named Eytan Bakshy. It turns out a lot of our ideas about the “echo chamber effect” on the web– or at least on Facebook– might not be true.
The echo chamber idea, propagate by folks like Eli Pariser and Manjoo himself, was that rather than encouraging exposure to new ideas, the web actually enabled us to surround ourselves with like-minded individuals, leaving us all comfy inside an intellectual bubble of our own devising. Instead of challenging us, the internet makes it feel like our opinions are much more widely held than they really are.
According to this new study by Facebook’s Eytan Bakshy, this bit of received wisdom might not be so. By gaming Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm (which determines which posts users see) and splitting his test sample into two groups,
…Bakshy could answer some important questions about how we navigate news online. Are people more likely to share information because their friends pass it along? And if we are more likely to share stories we see others post, what kinds of friends get us to reshare more often—close friends, or people we don’t interact with very often? Finally, the experiment allowed Bakshy to see how “novel information”—that is, information that you wouldn’t have shared if you hadn’t seen it on Facebook—travels through the network. This is important to our understanding of echo chambers. If an algorithm like EdgeRank favors information that you’d have seen anyway, it would make Facebook an echo chamber of your own beliefs. But if EdgeRank pushes novel information through the network, Facebook becomes a beneficial source of news rather than just a reflection of your own small world.
That’s exactly what Bakshy found.
The study does indicate that we’re more likely to share information from our closest contacts, but we also share information from the weak links in our networks, and that’s how new information spreads through the network. This makes intuitive sense to me, and gibes with my experience of using Facebook.
Sure, there’s an echo-chamber effect, and I often find my close friends sharing the same articles and YouTube videos. But Facebook also allows for sharing with the looser connections in my network. Take this video I shared on Facebook earlier this week:
Hello from ant1mat3rie on Vimeo.
Among my Facebook friends who liked or commented on it were:
- My cousin in Anchorage
- Two nonprofit communications colleagues
- An old friend from college now teaching in Texas
- A nonprofit communications professional I met at a training a couple years ago
That simple act of sharing crossed several social networks, and when my cousin in Alaska shared it on her Facebook page, it crossed over to a whole new network. Now, what I shared was just a funny video, not the kind of hard news or political opinion that people worry about with the “echo chamber” effect (and in fact Bakshy is planning followup research to explore this kind of sharing), but it’s encouraging nonetheless.
It also points to another problem with the direction social networks are moving in with things like “frictionless sharing,” where apps from media companies like the Washington Post automatically publish everything a user reads on their site to his or her Facebook stream. I’m much more likely to click on a link from someone I’m less close to if I think they’ve put some thought into it before posting– that they’ve curated the information they’re sharing, rather than out-sourcing the job to some automated script. That’s less true of links posted by my close friends, because, well, I’m close to them.
But that only increases the echo effect, and decreases the chances for interesting content to spread across social networks. It’s one more way Facebook is making itself more attractive to its corporate partners at the expense of its ability to share novel, interesting content with people who wouldn’t otherwise have seen it.