Bursting the bubble: in defense of the Facebook News Feed
The result of the US presidential election and the sensationalist manner in which it has widely been covered has fired up the debate on whether the media influence or at least reinforce the pre-existing political views of its consumers. Very likely owed to the polarising potential of the presidential candidates, the debate has maybe been more controversial than it has been since the beginning of the 21st century up to now. The algorithm Facebook uses to assemble a newsfeed that is tailored to each individual user has hence come under particularly scrutinising criticism, leading to Mark Zuckerberg questionably declaring: “Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99% of what people see is authentic.”
In 2014, Derek Thompson admitted that newspapers, magazines and broadcasts covering soft news and entertainment have for a long time outnumbered the sales and spectators of their hard news counterparts. Although seeing the potential of making your “News Feed a news feed” by carefully selecting who to follow or unfollow, he nevertheless holds every user individually accountable by concluding that they could do just that — but they choose not to. But why is that?
Facebook has since introduced an algorithm that influences the visibility of certain posts it identifies to be more or less relevant based on a number of different factors from Likes to post-engagement and overall popularity. The algorithm is allegedly also effective when the setting of News Feed is switched from “Top stories” to “Most recent”.
And since the establishment-media of the US have left its college-educated consumers gasping as they groundbreakingly failed to predict the electoral victory of the Republican candidate, critics on either side of the political spectrum have started spewing bubbles: Republican voters must have been living in a bubble of hoaxes! Democratic voters must have been living in a bubble of privilege separating them from their fellow working-class citizens that are increasingly struggling to make a living!
The election result leaves us all racking our brains around the question: How on earth could it happen that a demagogue Stephen Colbert accurately calls “so privileged, the first job he ever had to apply for was the President of the United States”, is moving into the White House as a working class hero? This question is blatantly mind-boggling and contradictory as can be, and the answer can impossibly be as simple as “It’s because of the Facebook News Feed.”
I am confident to say that I am not only a member, but a representative of a generation that has been branded lazy, unpolitical and out of touch due to their presence on social media. I am also arrogant enough to say that a majority of us gets what preceding generations fail to grasp: media literacy is a thing! We grew up forwarding chain mails, hoping it would prevent us from being haunted by the ghost of a dead girl or make our crush fall in love with us. We also grew out of that. We don’t just perceive people that are older than us to be awkward on social media: best case scenario, they are awkward, because they don’t follow unwritten social media etiquette (if you don’t know what that means, you’re probably one of them. Sorry.); worst case scenario, they are media illiterates that believe everything that is put in front of them without comparing and evaluating sources. But is that really a problem Facebook has created?
I hate to dig up this commonplace, but people have always been sceptical of new technologies. In 2016, I don’t believe in the adolescent any more, that is an age-related liberal mind. They call us digital natives for a reason. Utilizing your News Feed as a news source is a fantastic tool to get an overview over a number of different news sources. It is no different from watching CNN, BBC or Fox News. Or reading The New York Times, the Guardian or the Daily Mail. Neither makes you surrender to an opinion making overlord, nor does it relieve you from having to compare and evaluate your sources to put yourself into a position that enables you to form an opinion on an issue. A political system based on fundamental rights such as the freedom of press will have a hard time trying to exclude certain voices from the discussion, and it shouldn’t. What we however can and must do in our day and age, is to include not only literacy, but media literacy into the scope of the educational mandate, so that people stop holding the media accountable for not bursting their bubble. It’s not their job. It’s ours.
