» this is social acebook has taken this idea and perfected it to an art . You ’ re always telling Facebook what you care about and what content is irrelevant to you . Its algorithm picks up what you scroll past , what you click , and what you share . It gets smarter and smarter , always producing a personalized version of its news feed , picking and selecting from between the hundreds of posts your friends upload , to display only the content most likely to get a reaction from you . This may sound like a relatively small and obvious innovation , but it has deep-reaching effects on many industries .
Take journalism , for example . Last year , a study revealed that nearly two-thirds of US adults get “ most ” of their news from social media . That in itself is significant , but a British study found that less than half of people who find news through social media could correctly name the news organization that published it .
In other words , people are increasingly turning to social platforms like Facebook for their news , getting the news from what their friends post . As far as they can remember , “ I saw the news on Facebook ,” is all they can say of the source . It ’ s become paramount for 21st-century newsrooms to have dedicated teams of editors who manage social media presence , ensuring their content is built to travel well , share well , and if they ’ re lucky , have people remember where it came from .
Social media has allowed us to offer more of ourselves online , but this has had the unintended effect of narrowing the world for many . When all you see is what your friends post , filtered further by what you ’ ve clicked on in the past , this creates an echo chamber . You feed yourself to the machine , and the machine reads the input back to you . Thinker and activist Eli Pariser coined the term “ the filter bubble ” to capture this effect : as algorithms figure out what you like , they filter out what you won ’ t like , so you ’ re less exposed to opposing and alternate worldviews . Pariser warns that algorithms may “ create the impression that our narrow self-interest is all that exists .”
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