2 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2022
    1. Indeed, the political echo chambers on Twitter are so extreme that individual users' political leanings can be predicted with high accuracy: you have the same opinions as the majority of your connections.

      Similar to my previous annotation, I believe that the more you share or interact with content that shows exactly where you're politically standing, the platform will then show you more content that pretty much proves the said bias. I've seen this before on Facebook during the presidential elections in the Philippines this year. The acquaintances that I have back home and their friends pretty much share/voted for the same presidential candidate. I only go to Facebook to read/view my friends' posts but I would say that even though I never interacted with any of the content regarding the Philippine presidential election, my feed for months contained mainly memes, articles, or posts about it and they're mostly about how bad the OTHER candidate is.

    2. Modern technologies are amplifying these biases in harmful ways, however. Search engines direct Andy to sites that inflame his suspicions, and social media connects him with like-minded people, feeding his fears.

      I can agree that algorithms confirm our biases. I can confidently say this because I’ve seen my friends’ feeds before and the content that is showing up on theirs is very different from mine. On top of that, I can only imagine the amount of political news content that shows up on the feed of those who are very active in sharing their political opinions on their social media. I created an Instagram page for my bunnies and followed other bunny pages as well as pages that promote veganism. I’m not a vegan myself but these are the types of pages I don’t normally follow on my personal page. I noticed that a lot of content that is showing up on my bunnies explore page are gruesome videos/photos showing the practices of the farm industry. Although I am aware of these unethical practices, I found myself getting angry and started sharing those videos on bunnies’ Instagram stories. It’s interesting because the vegan pages that I follow don’t really post gruesome photos/videos, they just post educational content about veganism and recipes.