Content Weapons Primer: Echo Chambers
Echo Chambers In Social Media
In case you never heard about echo chambers before, it is important that you understand what it is before we can analyze its behavior in social media.
What Is Echo Chamber?
Simply put, echo chamber is the term that is used to describe a situation where data points, beliefs, and ideas are reinforced by the power of repetition on a closed system. This means that the ideas are always reinforced and there is no permission for new ideas or concepts to be discussed.
Now that you understand what echo chambers is, it is time to analyze echo chambers in social media.
Echo Chambers In Social Media
While echo chambers has started a long time ago, the reality is that most people start noticing it pretty recently.
One of the episodes that marked this acknowledgment was when President Donald Trump decided to retweet a video from a far-right group. At the time, and when asked why he shared the video and why he didn’t even bother to check the people’s biographies that were in the video, he stated: “the video is the video, it’s not a faked video”.
While this may seem pretty natural for some, for others is the culmination that the Internet can be used and abused to construct the narratives you want.
When the Internet appeared, the main goal was to use it as a way to exchange new ideas for free that would allow us all to evolve. However, and even at that time, there were some dissonant voices that alerted that this was a utopia.
And when people’s least expect, we arrived in 2017 with plenty of stories showing that these dissonant voices were actually just a bit ahead of their time. After so many revelations about campaigns of misinformation, troll factories, cyberbullying, among so many others, the world is finally looking at the Internet and particularly social media with a different set of eyes.
The reality is that echo chambers didn’t start in social media. They started in newspapers and they just spread all over social media. After all, this is where most people are at the moment and the Internet just helped spread out the word.
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Echo Chambers Effects On News & Politics
One of the things that we need to say is that as soon as people turned to the Internet, you just can’t take factual accuracy as granted. Even though there are people trying to confirm the data and info before publishing, this is just the minority. What we see today is that social media is only serving as a mean to tell your audience exactly what they want to hear.
You just see the proliferation of conspiracies and urban myths. Besides, according to PewResearch, more than 60% of millennials read the news on social media. In addition, taking into consideration the Knight Center observed back in 2016, “… through social media, professional and other qualified news is mixed with un-checked information and opinions. Rumors and gossip get in the flow.” Besides, they continue to warn that “people may be losing the skills to differentiate information from opinion.”
Echo Chambers Effects On Health
But the effects of echo chambers don’t rely only on politics or news. The truth is that we are already seeing its effect on health issues as well. The reality is that there are a lot of dubious sources all over the Internet and social media and most people still don’t recognize them. However, we have already started seeing their effects in real life. For one reason or another, we have been seeing anti-vaccine groups emerging, for example.
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