Echo Chambers, Filter Bubbles, and Rabbit Holes
Are echo chambers and filter bubbles a thing? Do social media platforms lead to echo chambers? Do echo chambers lead to political polarisation or is it the other way around? TLDR, echo chambers and filter bubbles are not really a thing. Rabbit holes are a more substantiated concept.
A False Symmetry in Information Pathologies
Chambers, S. (2023). Deliberative democracy and the digital public sphere: Asymmetrical fragmentation as a political not a technological problem. Constellations (Oxford, England), 30(1), 61–68. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12662
“Focusing on echo chambers and fragmentation as a technological problem of information curation designed to maximize profit suggests a false symmetry in information pathologies. All social media users receive curated information, but not all social media users are equally victims of misinformation, or susceptible to narratives undermining legacy media sources” (p. 65).
“the diagnosis of a general centrifugal trend produced by the technology itself needs to be revised” (p. 65).
A Literature Review
Arguedas, A. et al. (2022), Echo chambers, filter bubbles, and polarisation: a literature review, The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. DOI: 10.60625/risj-etxj-7k60
“In summary, the work reviewed here suggests echo chambers are much less widespread than is commonly assumed, finds no support for the filter bubble hypothesis and offers a very mixed picture on polarisation and the role of news and media use in contributing to polarisation” (p. 5).
The Echo Chamber Effect
Cinelli, M., de Francisci Morales, G., Galeazzi, A., Quattrociocchi, W., & Starnini, M. (2021). The echo chamber effect on social media. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS, 118(9). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2023301118
“We can broadly define echo chambers as environments in which the opinion, political leaning, or belief of users about a topic gets reinforced due to repeated interactions with peers or sources having similar tendencies and attitudes. Selective exposure and confirmation bias (i.e., the tendency to seek information adhering to preexisting opinions) may explain the emergence of echo chambers on social media” (p. 1).
This definition is not so much about the ‘chamber’ as such, but more about what people choose to do and who they choose to associate with.
Are Filter Bubbles Real?
Bruns, A. (2019). Are filter bubbles real? Polity Press.
“Echo chambers and filter bubbles are exceptionally attractive concepts; they offer a simple, technological explanation for problems that many emerging and established democracies face. However, the closer one looks and the more one attempts to detect them in observable reality, the more outlandish and unrealistic they appear. The images of ‘chambers’ and ‘bubbles’ conjure up hermetically sealed spaces where only politically like-minded participants connect and only ideologically orthodox information circulates, but this seems highly improbable; Meineck therefore goes as far as calling filter bubbles ‘the dumbest metaphor of the Internet’” (p. 95).
An AI chatbot helped Americans who believe in conspiracy theories “exit the rabbit hole”
Owen, L. (2024), An AI chatbot helped Americans who believe in conspiracy theories “exit the rabbit hole”, Nieman Lab. (Media article).
See the academic paper here - Thomas H. Costello et al., Durably reducing conspiracy beliefs through dialogues with AI. Science385, eadq1814 (2024). DOI:10.1126/science.adq1814
