Social Media and Bias: The Tables Have Turned

In last week’s blog, I began discussing social media’s impact on our generation’s civic engagement. Essentially, social media possesses some characteristics, such as accessibility and inclusiveness, that help it reach large audiences and spread important information, but its enormous potential for profit through advertising attracts a ton of garbage. Pop culture nonsense disguised as news can outperform real journalism with click bate and misleading headlines. Today, I will discuss bias as it pertains to social media. Unfortunately, this new medium for information exchange actually feeds off the bias of the users themselves.

We can all quickly call to mind some viral Facebook hoax that fooled way too many of our friends. Personal messages from Mark Zuckerberg asking for $2.99 a month for a Facebook subscription may seem like harmless tom-foolery that tricks only the most gullible of internet newbies, but other lies are not so benign. Last November, following the terrorist attacks in Paris, a Spanish newspaper, La Razón, published the image on the left-side of the photo below on their front page after it went viral on the internet. 

On the left, the allegedly muslim man wearing a vest of explosives holds a copy of the Quran while a strangely shaped shampoo bottle sits inconspicuously on the back right edge of the bathtub behind him (it is a shampoo bottle, right? right?!). On the right, we see the original image of a sikh man taking a bathroom selfie with an iPad. Its terrifying to think that thousands of people really did think that this innocent person committed one of the worst atrocities of the twenty-first century. Apparently, they didn’t even pause for a moment to consider the fact that his Quran would need a built-in camera to take the picture in the first place. When it comes to social media, people are prone to believe anything that reflects their own beliefs. Following the attacks, the global population felt anger toward Muslims and desperately wanted a face at which to direct their anger. Had everyone put in five seconds of rational thought while looking at the photo, this entire situation could have been avoided. Clearly social media users observe, form opinions, and pass judgments in a time span well under five seconds.

It turns out that this propensity to believe a conclusion more readily when it agrees with an individual’s prior base of knowledge (or opinions) is very well understood. It is called confirmation bias. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a professor of business psychology at University College London, wrote an article in the Guardian focusing on confirmation bias online. He argues that since we cannot ever come close to reading all the information the internet has to offer on a certain subject, we choose to instead prioritize information based on how fully we agree with it. If you already know that you hold a certain opinion about politics, economics, or the environment, you are far more likely to read articles that confirm your current understanding because trying to get through the mountain of information that exists opposing your viewpoint is just too intimidating. 

Interestingly, ego may actually act as the single largest cause of confirmation bias on the internet. Ask yourself honestly, do you hold biased viewpoints? Do you really do all you can to attain a balanced base of information? Here’s a good one: are you more biased than the average person? In a study done by researchers at Carnegie Melon University, test subjects responded to that very question. CMU reports, “The most telling finding was that everyone is affected by blind spot bias - only one adult of 661 said that he/she is more biased than the average person.” The blind spot bias affects the person you see in the mirror. Everyone thinks quite highly of his or her own intellectual neutrality and open-mindedness, but, statistically speaking, half of the people in the world have to be more biased than the average person. 

The danger in the move toward obtaining news information by scrolling through Facebook or Twitter lies not in the bias of the articles themselves but in users’ inherent biases in selecting which links to anoint with a tap of their thumbs. Credible news sources must present information in at least a somewhat objective manner to maintain their reputability. Individuals, however, need not abide by the same standard. They can find and read any information they desire, and, as I have discussed, the information they seek more often echoes their beliefs back to them than stimulates critical thinking. Only a deliberate desire to value diverse viewpoints in today’s internet age will prevent our own egos from limiting our minds.   

A New Civic Platform?

Right now, I want you to think about how you obtain information about the world around you. Do you read a physical newspaper? Do watch CNN, MSCNBC, or FOX News on a television? Do you read journals about current events? Here’s a question: how often do you actively seek information about a particular current event or civic issue?

While our generation may go information hunting the “old-school” way every once and a while for particularly important topics, I think we are all taking part in the gradual overthrow of traditional news sources without even realizing it. Who, you ask, is leading this coup d’état? Facebook. Twitter. Reddit. Snapchat. The list goes on. I think we can all can relate to this experience: you are sitting quietly, maybe in the morning after waking up, in between classes, in the middle of a homework assignment, before bed, staring fixedly at your phone, tablet, or computer screen, scrolling mindlessly through Facebook or Twitter, and you see a news story about a meth lab in Texas or a woman who lived to be 110 or a prodigious boy-genius who can count down from infinity to zero. You get halfway through the article and suddenly you realize you don’t care at all about what you’re reading. You exit out, continue scrolling down the newsfeed, and repeat the process again and again. Perhaps for some of us, myself certainly included, this is how you get up to date on the state of the world.

This raises the question, does our behavior control technology, or does technology control our behavior? A study by the American Press Institute provided an interesting insight into this very question. Most people assume that our generation lacks interest in staying up to date on politics and civic affairs, noting that we spend more time on social networking sights than television news or online newspapers. The American Press Institute’s survey sampled 1,045 adults between the ages of 18 and 34 in 2015. It found that 69% of the subjects get news daily through social media, and 45% regularly follow “hard news” topics. This means that a significant portion of the news has deep civic importance. Perhaps most interestingly, the overwhelming majority of people in the survey said that social media gives them access to a diverse array of opinions, creating a balanced viewpoint. This certainly damages the validity of the notion that social media allows people to filter out the ideas they do not like. Perhaps the internet offers more variety in perspective than watching a single news channel or reading one paper. 

Needless to say, it is wrong to view this small piece of research as the definitive analysis of online behavior. Derek Thompson of the Atlantic wrote an interesting response to these findings. He noted that the most viewed stories on Facebook in January 2015 were, “109-Year-Old Woman Gives A Remarkable Reason For Her Long Life,” and, “The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think.” These types of stories riddle users’ News Feeds, and they certainly don’t count as heavy-weight journalism. Additionally, less than half of Facebook users say news is their main motivation for checking the website throughout the day. Finally, a study done by university professors for PEW throws some doubt on social media’s claimed diversity of opinion. They found that well-off and well-educated people are far more likely to engage in online activities dealing with politics or current events. This is also true for offline engagement. In other words, social media fails to bring any new players to the table, which seems rather disappointing for its revolutionary potential.

These studies seem to present contradictory findings, but, in my opinion, they really don’t. Based on the facts, social media is a place where people claim to find real news but also spend plenty of time reading garbage. It is a place where affluent people come to find diverse opinions but exclude important demographics. To explain the former paradox, I argue that individuals in our generation spend so much time browsing through social media that they can’t escape learning a thing or two about important events, even if they spend most of their time on other topics. News today has a certain osmotic quality. As far as diversity goes, I think people tend to view their social media feed as the embodiment of the outside world without realizing that it only constitutes a small sliver. It just seems like so much when it really is not. Social media certainly has changed the news landscape forever, but whether or not it can affect the civic outlook of an entire generation is anyone’s guess.