More Updates: ECREA 2021 and More Writing on 'Filter Bubbles'

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:

Axel Bruns. “Echo Chambers? Filter Bubbles? The Misleading Metaphors That Obscure the Real Problem.” Hate Speech and Polarization in Participatory Society, eds. Marta Pérez-Escolar and José Manuel Noguera-Vivo. London: Routledge, 2022. 33-48. DOI: 10.4324/9781003109891-4.

As a reminder: I’m making a more comprehensive argument against these simplistic, misleading metaphors in my recent book Are Filter Bubbles Real?, too. The book offers distinct definitions for the two concepts (definitons that are largely absent from the existing literature), provides a thorough review of the evidence for and against ‘filter bubbles’ and ‘echo chambers’, and demonstrates how the interminable debates about these illusory concepts distract us from dealing with more critical problems. More details are here:

Axel Bruns. Are Filter Bubbles Real? Cambridge: Polity, 2019.

But back to ECREA 2021: while I can’t take much credit for the presentations themselves, I was also involved in putting together a really excellent panel on what Facebook now calls ‘coordinated inauthentic behaviour’ on social media platforms. In addition to a paper led by my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague Dan Angus, this also featured fascinating contributions from Marian-Andrei Rizoiu (in collaboration with us at the DMRC), Fabio Giglietto, and Franziska Keller. In spite of what turned out to be a very late presentation timeslot for us here in Australia, this ended up being a stimulating conversation, and we’ve now made the panel video available on YouTube:

Tim Graham, Marian-Andrei Rizoiu, Axel Bruns, and Dan Angus; Fabio Giglietto, Nicola Righetti, Luca Rossi, and Giada Marino; Dan Angus, Tim Graham, Tobias Keller, Brenda Moon, and Axel Bruns; and Franziska B. Keller, Sebastian Stier, David Schoch, and JungHwan Yang. “Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour in Social Media: New Methods and Findings.” Panel presented at the European Communication Conference (ECREA) conference, online, 7 Sep. 2021.

So much for ECREA 2021 and related work, then. I’ll be back with an update on our AoIR 2021 presentations next week, after that conference finishes.