People who turn to social media for news and information are at a higher risk of becoming trapped in a “collective social bubble” compared to using search engines, according to researchers at Indiana University.
The study “Measuring online social bubbles,” was recently published in the open-access online journal PeerJ Computer Science, based its results on an analysis of over 100 million Web clicks and 1.3 billion public posts on social media.
“These findings provide the first large-scale empirical comparison between the diversity of information sources reached through different types of online activity,” said Dimitar Nikolov, a doctoral student in the School of Informatics and Computing at IU Bloomington, who is lead author on the study. “Our analysis shows that people collectively access information from a significantly narrower range of sources on social media compared to search engines.”
In order to measure the diversity of information accessed over each medium, researchers at IU came up with a method that assigned a score for how user clicks from social as opposed to search engines were distributed across millions of sites.
Users’ web traffic concentrated on fewer sites was indicated by a lower score; while a higher score indicated traffic scattered across more sites.
For example, a single click on CNN and nine clicks on MSNBC would generate a lower score than five clicks on each site.
The analysis found that overall, people who accessed news on social media scored significantly lower in terms of the diversity of their information sources than users who accessed current information using search engines.
The results show the rise of a “collective social bubble” where news is shared within communities of like-minded individuals, said Nikolov, noting a trend in modern media consumption where “the discovery of information is being transformed from an individual to a social endeavor.”
He added that people who adopt this behavior as a coping mechanism for “information overload” may not even be aware they’re filtering their access to information by using social media platforms, such as Facebook, where the majority of news stories originate from friends’ postings.
Moreover, to measure the range of news sources accessed by users, the IU scientists used an open directory of news sites, filtering out blogs and wikis, resulting in 3,500 news outlets.