Business Companies Media & Marketing & Investigate The Root Cause of Polarisation - Digital Marketing Assignment

Assignment Task -                 
 

OPINION 

Investigate the root cause of polarisation - don’t just blame social media filter bubbles.

We do not need to have another debate about the impact of platforms and algorithms, but a meaningful discussion about the complex causes of political and societal polarization. This is a debate that must involve all of us: governments, politicians, media, journalists, scholars, educators, activists, and ordinary citizens, as mainstream society confronts the renewed challenge of hyperpartisanship, populism, and political extremism.

Those who support the echo chamber or filter bubble thesis believe that, with online and social media as the key sources of information for an ever-growing percentage of the public, some people are only accessing information that re-enforces their existing opinions. 

They claim Brexit supporters might never have seen the warnings of the disastrous economic, social and political consequences of exiting the European Union and Trump followers might not have encountered reports of the candidate’s personal flaws or the campaign’s collusion with foreign powers. 

Away from these momentous occasions, echo chambers are also held responsible for the emergence of many more communities that espouse contrarian ideologies. These range from comparatively harmless conspiracy theorists compiling evidence of alien visitations all the way to extremists preaching racism, homophobia and religious intolerance. 

The empirical research, drawing on surveys and small-scale observations and on advanced and innovative digital methods and ‘big social data’, demonstrates clearly that echo chambers and filter bubbles not only do not exist outside the very fringes of mainstream society but that the incessant and continuing focus of media coverage, media scholarship and political debate on these ill-defined ideas overemphasizes the role of platforms and their algorithms in current political crises and obscures a far more critical challenge: the return of naked, hyperpartisan populism and political demagoguery. 

These populists do not live in isolated information cocoons but are perhaps even better informed about mainstream views that the ordinary citizens of the mainstream – yet they remain impervious and deeply opposed to moderate perspectives. The reasons for this opposition should not be sought in their communicative preferences: hyperpartisan use many of the same platforms and tools as the societal mainstream. 

The question is no longer what material these hyperpartisan encounters and how much that information diet is shaped by algorithms, but rather how they receive and process this content and incorporate it into their world views. 

Citizens in the mainstream and at the fringes of political debate each encounter a variety of news and perspectives, accepting the content that agrees with their world views and processing the information that does not. 

Other citizens may encounter the same fake news stories and choose not to share them, yet pass on the content that fact-checks them. This requires us to understand the motivations and the psychology of hyperpartisan as they navigate complex information environments. 

In a hyperconnected yet deeply polarised world, the most important filter remains in our heads, not in our networks. It is this cognitive filter that makes us reject some ideas out of hand, even despite the evidence that supports them, while we cling to others that have long since been disproven and discredited. 

Dr Axel Bruns is a professor at the Queensland University of Technology's Digital Media Research Centre, president of the Association of Internet Researchers and has written two other books about online media and co-edited three books on the topic. This column is an edited excerpt of Are Filter Bubbles Real? published by Polity, which will be released in September.