The final speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is QUT DMRC PhD graduate Dr. Jing Zeng, whose focus is on the automated dissemination of conspiracy theories on Twitter – including suggestions that celebrities like Justin Bieber, industry leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, and royals are actually shape-shifting lizards; that planes spread mind-controlling chemtrails; that the Earth is flat; or that the California wildfires were started by a new energy weapon created by the U.S. government.
Such conspiracy theorists are experts at providing apparently simple explanations for complex phenomena. They also clusters together to support each other’s explanations with self-reinforcing theories that …
Rafael Grohmann from the Brazilian blog DigiLabour has asked me to answer some questions about my recent work – and especially my new book Are Filter Bubbles Real?, which is out now from Polity –, and the Portuguese version of that interview has just been published. I thought I’d post the English-language answers here, too:
1. Why are the ‘filter bubble’ and ‘echo chamber’ metaphors so dumb?
The first problem is that they are only metaphors: the people who introduced them never bothered to properly define them. This means that these concepts might sound sensible, but that they mean …
Filter bubbles and echo chambers have become very widely accepted concepts – so much so that even Barack Obama referenced the filter bubble idea in is farewell speech as President. They’re now frequently used to claim that our current media environments – and in particular social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter – have affected public debate and led to the rise of hyperpartisan propagandists on the extreme fringes of politics, by enabling people to filter out anything that doesn’t agree with their ideological position.
The second presentation in this IAMCR 2019 session is presented by Nadine Strauß, whose focus is on the approaches by news readers to exposing themselves to a diversity of viewpoints. To do so is important for democracy, but it seems that polarisation in society is increasing, and there remain concerns about the role of ‘filter bubbles’ on people’s information diets.
But political beliefs, attitudes, and even voting behaviours still remain strongly influenced by people’s personal and familial networks rather than just by their online and social media activities; here, network heterogeneity plays a critical role in ensuring the diversity of …
The next session at IAMCR 2019 begins with my own paper, which presents an all-too-brief overview of the argument in my new book Are Filter Bubbles Real? (Spoiler alert: no.) The slides of my presentation are below, and a full paper is also available.
The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Jaron Harambam, whose focus is on the personalisation of news content to individual readers and the implications that this may have for the news that users encounter. This may help readers navigate a vast and complex information landscape, and enable news outlets to provide not only popular but also relevant niche stories to the relevant audiences.
At the same time, however, it may also mean that readers no longer share the same information landscape, and this could have deleterious impacts on democratic information and participation – the emergence of a ‘filter bubble’ is …
The final speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Mariella Bastian, who points out the impact of the digital turn in journalistic conflict coverage; journalists themselves are now more mobile, but citizen content has also become easier to incorporate into the coverage. Further, digital media also intensify the dissemination of content coverage, and this could both increase or decrease hostility between the conflict parties.
Polarisation may also matter here, as it may aggravate the polarising effects of conflict-related news, open avenues for the manipulation of what content different users encounter, and undermine user trust in the quality of the content …
Rafael Grohmann from the Brazilian blog DigiLabour has asked me to answer some questions about my recent work – and especially my new book Are Filter Bubbles Real?, which is out now from Polity –, and 
The next session at 
