Tag Archives: filter bubbles

“If you ask most people” – how to burst a journalist’s filter bubble

Here is a fascinating post by Laurence Jantalipinski (h/t Giuseppe Sollazzo) which takes assumptions made by a reporter and tests that against actual polling. The subject itself is irrelevant — but the method is a great anecdote to relate to journalism students to demonstrate why it’s important to challenge your own assumptions about what “most people” think.

Here’s how it goes: a reporter makes a casual assertion:

“If you ask most people why they don’t trust Labour, they will respond with one of the following…”

…before listing reasons which, perhaps, are articulated within her own social circle. But is one reporter’s “most people” representative?

Well that’s the thing. When Talipinski tested those reasons against other possibilities using a proper poll with 1100 people, he found none ranked in the top five: Continue reading →

5 ways journalists can use Nuzzel with Twitter lists

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Nuzzel offers a short-cut to the most shared stories in your Twitter timeline – and is already popular with journalists. But while it’s best known for directing you to your friends’ most popular links, it has other uses. In a guest post for OJB, Andy Brightwell shows how you can use Nuzzel to burst your filter bubble, follow people in a particular location or industry, see the world from someone’s perspective, or create a niche newsletter.

Since Nuzzel added Twitter lists it’s been possible to curate ‘custom feeds’ from sets of tweeters. For journalists this means an opportunity to seek new perspectives on communities, places and politics through Twitter. Below I’ve outlined five different ways to use the feature — but first, a bit of background… Continue reading →

AllSides’s John Gable: from the Dark Ages of the internet to bursting bubbles

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AllSides uses a bias rating system

As part of a series of articles on the innovators tackling the filter bubble phenomenon, Andrew Brightwell interviews John Gable, founder and CEO of AllSides, a website that has devised its own way to present alternative perspectives on American news.

When a man who helped build the first successful web browser says there’s something wrong with the Internet, it probably pays to listen.

“The internet is broken.”

John Gable’s diagnosis has authority: he has more than 30 years in the tech business, including stints at Microsoft, AOL and as a product manager for Netscape Navigator.

Now he is founder and CEO of AllSides Inc, a news website with a distinct mission. Visit AllSides.com and it offers the news you’d expect on any US politics site, except that its lead stories include a choice of articles: one from the left, centre and right.

“The headlines are so radically different that even reading [them together] tells you more about that topic than reading one story all the way through.”

Continue reading →

Bursting the filter bubble: The Echo Chamber Club

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image by Jordi Boixareu

Social media ‘filter bubbles’ – where users only see news sympathetic with their own views – have been blamed for pretty much everything considered ‘wrong’ with politics, from obscuring Trump’s popularity and encouraging political polarisation to the ‘fake news’ epidemic. New publishing startup Echo Chamber Club offers to burst readers’ filter bubbles and challenge their views — and it’s doing so well that it is already planning to expand. Andrew Brightwell interviews its founder, Alice Thwaite.

The Echo Chamber Club, founded in June 2016, sets out to “help ‘liberal and progressive metropolitans’ understand different points of view for themselves.” It publishes weekly emails, each covering a subject in the news, but offering a perspective directly opposed to the liberal consensus.

Since starting in the wake of the UK’s vote to leave the European Union, it has challenged liberal perceptions on Russia’s support of the Assad regime in Syria, inflation policy, Western military intervention, and the EU referendum. Continue reading →