Filter Bubbles: Limited Evidence in the U.S. and Germany

The next speaker in our ICA 2018 session is Bibi Reisdorf, who focusses on how people tailor their social network connections through friending, unfriending, and blocking. This again draws on the Quello Search Project study, a survey of 14,000 search users across seven nations.

First, Internet users consult an average of 4.5 different types of media to find information about politics; more than 50% use search engines to check information (very) often, and 80% do it from time to time (how they do so is limited by their search skills, however). There are also some national variations in these patterns, though. In this, people trust information from social media least of the sources they consult, incidentally.

Bibi’s focus here is on the U.S. and Germany, and for the U.S. this shows that some 15-25% people have blocked, deleted, or unfriended their connections because of political arguments, political content they disliked, or an overload of political content. Some 8% of users, on the other hand, didn’t even know that they could do so at all. In Germany, such politically motivated blocking is even less prevalent (9-18%). This is in spite of the vast majority of users saying that their friends and connections have mixed or diverging political views from their own. U.S. users are more likely to have noticed that their friends have different political beliefs from social media (Germans seem to know this already).

Only about one fifth in each country rarely or never encountered political views they disagreed with; this provides a strong argument against the prevalence of filter bubbles, of course. Age (older) and gender (female) seemed to work against unfriending, too; in the U.S., hyperpartisan users on the right as well as left were quite likely (50%) to unfriend because of politics, but this is less pronounced in Germany. Heavy users were also more likely to unfriend.

So the tailoring of social media does happen, but not all that much; the majority of users report encountering a broad variety of political views. This could be good or bad: it means that the majority encounters a balanced diet of views, but that hyperpartisans can be genuinely lost to public debate as they descend into their filter bubbles.