Echo chamber
An environment in which a person meets only views that agree with their own, so that those views are reinforced and opposing ones come to seem rare or absurd. In media, the self-selected diet of outlets and feeds that produces that effect; the related filter bubble is the version a recommendation system builds for you.
The metaphor is old, but its modern use dates from Cass Sunstein's Republic.com in 2001, which worried that the internet would let people filter their news so thoroughly that they would never meet a disagreeing voice, and from Eli Pariser's The Filter Bubble in 2011, which observed that the filtering was being done for them by personalization algorithms. The two ideas are usually run together. An echo chamber is chosen; a filter bubble is served.
The research since has been more mixed than the alarm. Most people's media diets are less closed than the metaphor suggests, and the strongest echo chambers are found among the most politically engaged, who seek them out. But where chambers exist they are a propagandist's ideal environment, because the techniques that depend on the audience not hearing the other side, Card Stacking, Straw Man, Stereotyping, and Us Versus Them, meet no resistance, and because repetition within a closed group produces Manufactured Consensus without anyone having to manufacture it.
Platforms contribute through ranking: content that provokes engagement is shown more, and the content that provokes most is often the content that confirms. The defense is the oldest one, reading the other side, and it has to be done on purpose.
Compare computational propaganda.
Sources
- Sunstein, Cass R. Republic.com. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. ISBN 978-0691070254
- Pariser, Eli. The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. ISBN 978-1594203008
- Bruns, Axel. Are Filter Bubbles Real? Cambridge: Polity, 2019. ISBN 978-1509536443