Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles

If it’s Thursday, this must be Stavanger, and the Norwegian Media Researcher Conference. I’m here on the invitation of the excellent organisers Helle Sjøvaag and Raul Ferrer-Conill to present the opening keynote, which broadly outlines the agenda of my Australian Laureate Fellowship and aims to move us beyond seeking easy explanations for the apparent rise in polarisation merely in technological changes (“it’s social media’s fault”; “we’re all in echo chambers and filter bubbles”), and to instead explore research approaches that enable us to understand why hyperpartisans are so willing to engage with and share deeply polarised views that even they might be aware are far removed from any objective truth.

Here are the slides from my presentation:

In July 2021, I was exceptionally honoured to be awarded an Australian Laureate Fellowship: a five-year, A$3.5 million research grant that represents the highest level of individual recognition by the Australian Research Council (ARC). Laureate Fellowships are exceedingly rare – no more than 17 are awarded each year, and they go very predominantly to the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines; indeed, as far as I can tell, mine was the first awarded to a researcher from the Media and Communication field in the 13 years of the scheme’s existence.

Most importantly, the Laureate Fellowship enables me to build a team of four Postdoctoral Research Associates (five-year, full-time postdoctoral positions) and four PhD researchers (three-year PhD scholarships) starting in early 2022, plus another four PhD positions to follow mid-project, in 2024. The whole team will be based with me and our excellent community of research staff and students at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre in Brisbane, Australia. If these positions are of interest to you, read on (and if you know of others who might be interested, please share this information with them)…

Commencing formally in February 2022, my Laureate project addresses the drivers and dynamics of partisanship and polarisation in online communication. It continues a trajectory of recent work that began with my 2018 book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere, which in turn sparked the 2019 book Are Filter Bubbles Real? that examined in some more detail whether there was any evidence for the claims that ‘filter bubbles’ and ‘echo chambers’ were increasingly enclosing us all in ideologically pure information environments on digital and social media platforms. (Spoiler: there wasn’t.)

I ended that book with a call to action: if the problem wasn’t simply technological (‘social media create filter bubbles’), then what is driving the increase in hyperpartisanship and polarisation that we seem to be experiencing in many countries around the world? Indeed, stepping back a little further  from that premise, is polarisation actually increasing? Can we use digital trace data to assess this, and systematically compare such assessments over time (to measure the speed of change) and across national contexts (to examine whether some political and media systems are more resilient than others)?

I’ve also outlined my path towards these questions, and the Laureate Fellowship, in my recent QUTeX talk during the ADM+S News & Media Symposium – I hope this provides a useful introduction to these concerns, and overview of my research agenda from here (there’s also a follow-up post on the QUTeX blog):

I’ve not yet had the chance to write much about one of the major new projects I’m involved with: the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S), a large-scale, multi-institutional, seven-year research centre that investigates the impact of automated decision-making technologies (including algorithms, artificial intelligence, and other such technologies) on all aspects of our personal and professional lives. In particular, for the first year of the Centre I’ve led the News & Media Focus Area, which recently held its inaugural symposium to take stock of current research projects and plan for the future. (This was also the time for me to hand that leadership over to my colleagues Jean Burgess (QUT) and James Meese (RMIT), as I step back from that role to concentrate on another major project – more on this in a future update.)

Within News & Media, I’ve also led a major research project which we launched publicly in late July, and which is now producing first research outcomes: the Australian Search Experience. Inspired by an earlier project by our ADM+S partner organisation AlgorithmWatch in Germany, this project investigates the extent to which the search results Australian users encounter as they query search engines like Google are personalised and therefore differ from user to user; if they are, this would leave open the possibility of user being placed in so-called ‘filter bubbles’ – a concept which I’ve questioned in my recent book Are Filter Bubbles Real? We even have a promo video:

Investigating such personalisation is difficult: since every user is assumed to see a personalised set of search results, we need to compare these results across a large number of users in order to determine whether there is any significant personalisation, and what aspects of these users’ identities might drive such personalisation. While some studies approach this challenge by setting up a large number of ‘fake’ user accounts that are given a particular user persona by making them search repeatedly for specific topics that are expected to contribute to the search engine’s profile for the account, AlgorithmWatch’s earlier, German study took a different approach and invited a large number of real users to contribute as citizen scientists to the study. To do so, they were asked to install a browser plugin that regularly searched for a predefined set of keywords and reported the results back to AlgorithmWatch’s server.

Our ADM+S project uses this same data donation approach, but extends it further: we query four major search engines (Google Search, Google News, Google Video, and YouTube), and we are able to vary our search terms over the duration of the project. Like the earlier project, we also ask users to provide some basic demographic information (in order to link any systemic personalisation patterns we may encounter with those demographics), but never access any of our participants’ own search histories. Our browser plugin is available for the desktop versions of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Edge, and I’m pleased to say that more than 1,000 citizen scientists have now installed the plugin.

If you’re based in Australia, and you’d like to contribute to the project, please go to the project Website to install the browser plugin. We’d love to get to 1,500 citizen scientists before the end of 2021.

For more background, I spoke to QUT’s Real World News earlier this year to explain the approach we’ve taken in developing this project:

Here’s the next instalment of my blog posts as I continue to work through my backlog of research updates – it’s been a big year, and it looks like there will be a fair few further posts to come. In this one I’ll focus on the European Communication Conference (ECREA), which was held online in September this year.

My own major contribution was another paper on the myth of ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’, reviewing the evidence and debunking the simplistic claims about the damaging effects that these phenomena are supposed to have. Here’s a video of the presentation, and more details are at the link below.

Axel Bruns. “Beyond the Bubble: A Critical Review of the Evidence for Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles.” Paper presented at the European Communication Conference (ECREA) conference, online, 7 Sep. 2021.

I’ve expanded on this discussion in a new book chapter in the excellent new collection Hate Speech and Polarization in Participatory Society, edited by Marta Pérez-Escolar and José Manuel Noguera-Vivo – many thanks to them both for the invitation to contribute a chapter. This provides a condensed version of the argument against ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’, and instead encourages us to look for the other, social and societal rather than technological factors driving hyperpartisanship and polarisation. (I’ll have more to say on the research agenda required to do so in a future post.) Here’s the book chapter as a pre-print, and the full book is now also available: