Does Facebook contribute to a political echo chamber?
Source: Jessica Guynn,
The News Feed does skew to an individual's own ideology but the content that users click on and their friends are "more important factors," the company said.
According to the study: On average, 23% of users' friends have an opposing political affiliation. Nearly 30% of the news stories that friends share cut across ideological lines. Of the news stories that appear in News Feed, nearly 29% is from a different political viewpoint. The same went for about 25% of news that people clicked on.
STUDY USERS AREN'T TYPICAL
But the study had limitations. All of the Facebook users studied over the course of six months either self identified as liberal or conservative in their profiles, making them a minority of users that may or may not reflect Facebook users at large.
Christian Sandvig says only 9% of Facebook users identify their "ideological affiliation" in a way that was "interpretable."
Of those that report an affiliation, only 46% reported an affiliation that was "interpretable," said Sandvig, who is an associate professor at the University of Michigan and a faculty associate of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
"That means this is a study about the 4% of Facebook users unusual enough to want to tell people their political affiliation on the profile page. That is a rare behavior," he wrote in a blog post entitled "The Facebook 'It's Not Our Fault' Study."
"We would expect that a small minority who publicly identifies an interpretable political orientation to be very likely to behave quite differently than the average person with respect to consuming ideological political news," Sandvig wrote. "The research claims just don't stand up against the selection procedure."
Facebook has caused controversy in the past for conducting a study on the emotions of its users without their knowledge or consent.
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