What happened to social media being a conversation platform instead of an echo chamber?
The article describes social media to currently be that "Curated and personalised news feeds are driving us into holes we might not be able to dig ourselves out of", meaning, we’re becoming more and more self-absorbed with those that share our own views. The article presents other influences on this, including Facebook where in 2013 the 'unfollow' feature was introduced. It gave users the ability to quietly unsubscribe from a friend’s feed without their friend knowing – hiding your friend's right wing views and pictures of their cats from your feed, for example – but to anyone else you're still friends.
- nearly one-third of social media users (31%) say they have changed their settings in order to see fewer posts from someone in their feed because of something related to politics
- while 27% have blocked or unfriended someone for that reason
- taken together, this amounts to 39% of social media users – and 60% of them indicate that they took this step because someone was posting political content that they found offensive.
As lastly stated by the article: "Did social media contribute to putting Trump into the White House or voting us out of the EU? Yes, but it isn't social media's fault; it's ours for not challenging the rhetoric and abandoning the debate." Which basically comments on how sometimes the audience in social media is passive and lets a dominating opinion that one would agree with, control their core beliefs, and this belief simply spreads with a snowball effect.
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