Kristin Tate offers National Review Online readers an interesting assessment of the use of Facebook to reinforce existing political views.
Deleting a friend on Facebook for reporting uncomfortable political information seems extreme. Yet it’s also extremely common. This wasn’t the first time, and won’t be the last, that I’ve been defriended on account of politics. Chances are that it’s happened to you too. Now the issue turns to that all-important question: What is going on?
According to a study from a researcher at the University of Colorado, religion and politics are the two most common reasons people delete their friends on Facebook. It turns out that we’re even more likely to delete our closest friends than our casual acquaintances.
The Pew Research Center revealed in another study that roughly 45 percent of “consistent liberals” have defriended or blocked a Facebook friend because they disagreed with his or her politics, while only 31 percent of “consistent conservatives” have done the same to their liberal friends. But conservatives aren’t off the hook: Consistent conservatives are more likely than liberals to see political views similar to their own on Facebook.
Add to the selectiveness of individuals the power of Facebook’s behind-the-scenes algorithms that figure out what kinds of posts you like. If you consistently hit the “like” button on liberal posts, those kinds of posts will appear in your Facebook news feed more often. Ditto for clicking “like” on conservative posts.
Our Facebook accounts have become echo chambers where we hear only what we’re most comfortable hearing. Don’t like hearing facts about the U.S.–Mexican border? Just click “defriend.” You hardly needed a million-dollar study from the Pew Research Foundation to know that. Especially if you’re a liberal.
The echo-chamber phenomenon would be less troubling if Facebook weren’t the biggest political-news source for millennials. The social-media network has made us more politically plugged-in than ever, but it’s also closing us off from new ideas, opposing viewpoints, and uncomfortable truths in ways we are just beginning to understand.
Millennials have embraced “safe spaces” during recent years, the idea being that they should be shielded from anything that they disagree with or that might make them feel — God forbid — uncomfortable. Young people are claiming emotional trauma after being exposed to ideas that conflict with their own. In other words, it’s apparently just a short step from banning Halloween costumes at Yale to blocking news about illegal immigration from your Facebook newsfeed.
