This Chrome extension shows you how biased your social feed is
Ever wonder if your Facebook feed is only telling you one side of the story? Well, research has shown that it can do just that.
Social media feeds can morph into echo chambers of your political beliefs, telling you only what like-minded friends and family think, and in doing so, ignoring the news and political material that would challenge them.
A new Google Chrome extension, aptly named PolitEcho, is trying to sift through this biased feedback loop to give us a clear picture of just how 'red' or 'blue' our feeds really are.
With everything looking promising for Hillary Clinton this past election, her loss was not just disappointing for many but genuinely surprising. The realization that such a miscalculation could have been drawn from a biased feed prompted Zachary Liu, a Princeton computer science student, to help create PolitEcho.
“Thus emerged the idea of PolitEcho, a visualization of our echo bubbles, a wakeup call to just how skewed our world view is,” he told New York Magazine's online tech platform Select All.
The views of friends and followers, where you live and your personal background can all play into what you think, and see, online. PolitEcho aims to show in just a few graphs how liberal, conservative, or in-between your Facebook page really is.
Using shades of red and blue, the charts give a clear look at what sides of the political spectrum are shaping your social media world. For instance, here's what a very liberal feed would look like:
To get the results, PolitEcho examines the political and media pages liked by friends — was it right-leaning Fox News or pretty liberal Huffington Post? — and gives them a score that indicates their leanings. Real news, fake news and politician's Facebook pages are all included.
Liu and some classmates created PolitEcho at the Facebook Global Hackathon competition in less than 20 hours. He said that right now all the data collected is private, but his team might start keeping track of aggregate data.
Another extension aiming to help people diversify their feeds, EscapeYourBubble, was launched last month.
Topics Politics
Marissa is a real-time news intern at the LA office. She has a bachelor's degree in political science from UC Santa Barbara and a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University. She's a free spirit.
