#echo-chambers — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #echo-chambers, aggregated by home.social.
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"That shift is the focus of a new preprint that Törnberg co-authored with University of Amsterdam colleague Richard Rogers. “When we talk about social media, there are certain assumptions about what it is,” said Törnberg. “It’s user-generated, and there’s a platform that organizes interaction, but the platform cannot produce content on its own. So instead the platform allows people to connect with each other, and it just provides infrastructure for that. The [terms] social network and social media is almost synonymous. Those describe pre-algorithm Twitter circa 2012 quite well.”
Now that more and more users are disengaging and often leaving those platforms entirely, the AI bots are moving in, often at the instigation of the social media platforms themselves. “We don’t need the users anymore,” said Törnberg of the reasoning behind such decisions. “We don’t need them to generate content. We can generate our own content and we can automate the users. So there’s a splintering of what used to be social media.”
Törnberg identified three new kinds of emerging online media platforms, starting with private or semi-private group chats like WhatsApp. “The social part has just moved into these private group chat features,” he said. Then there other protected communities like Substack, often organized around a certain influential leader, “where there are more boundaries to joining in such a way that bots doesn’t make sense. The dynamic and logic of those places are very different from social media and much more driven by parasocial relationships.”"
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/05/rip-social-media-what-comes-next-is-messy/
#SocialMedia #EchoChambers #FilterBubbles #Polarization #Algorithms
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#Tradition Instead of #Progress ⛔ Why #innovate and improve the world when you can simply cling to the good old days?
#Dangerous #Diversity 🏳️🌈 Diversity? No thanks! Who needs new #perspectives when you can just stay in your comfortable #echochambers?
#CriticalThinking – But Only When It Suits You! 🧐 #Questioning things is great, as long as you only question things that don’t fit into your own world view.
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🧵1/7: A #longthread on #bluesky / #bridge / #echochambers.
Following @Gargron's decision to opt out of the Bluesky bridge, most likely driven by the platform's official verification of the #ICE account, and one last pointless interaction with a Bluesky account holder,
I decided to follow suit & sever my own Bluesky ties. I realised the idea of echo chambers was probably a myth invented by the giant #socialmedia platforms to prevent users from fleeing. Let me explain.
https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/115912977448929626 -
It occurred to me just now that I never was a part of the algorithmic social media platform (be it Twitter, Facebook, or otherwise…), I only used twitter via third-party app and never had the algorithm shoved into my eyes. When Twitter killed apps, I moved to #Mastodon.
I watched everyone I know fall into that it though. Nothing I ever told them about how unhealthy it was ever seems to land properly.
#SocialMedia #Twitter #Facebook #Meta #Algorithms #EchoChambers #ForceFed
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The new brainiacs of the right-wing tech world convene 🔗💡, proving once again that Silicon Valley is the place for echo chambers to thrive 🎉. Brace yourselves for riveting #discussions on how to mix #libertarianism with your morning latte ☕️. Meanwhile, enjoy the latest on ethical capitalism with a side of irony 🍿.
https://bayareacurrent.com/meet-the-new-right-wing-tech-intelligentsia/ #rightwingtech #echochambers #ethicalcapitalism #SiliconValley #HackerNews #ngated -
"As detailed in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed study, coauthors Petter Törnberg, AI and social media assistant professor, and research assistant Maik Larooij simulated a social media platform that was populated entirely by AI chatbots, powered by OpenAI's GPT-4o large language model, to see if there was anything we could do to stop social media from turning into echo chambers.
They tested out six specific intervention strategies — including switching to chronological news feeds, boosting diverse viewpoints, hiding social statistics like follower counts, and removing account bios — to stop the platform from turning into a polarized hellscape.
To their dismay, none of the interventions worked to a satisfactory degree, and only some showed modest effects. Worse yet, as Ars Technica reports, some of them made the situation even worse.
For instance, ordering the news feed chronologically reduced attention inequality but floated extreme content to the top.
It's a sobering reality that flies in the face of companies' promises of constructing a "digital town square" — as billionaire and X owner Elon Musk once called it — where everybody coexists peacefully.
With or without intervention, social media platforms may be doomed to devolve into a highly polarized breeding ground for extremist thinking."
https://futurism.com/social-network-ai-intervention-echo-chamber
#SocialMedia #AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Chatbots #Echochambers #Disinformation
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Interesting experiment that shows emergent dysfunctional characteristics in simulated social networks
"Can We Fix Social Media? Testing Prosocial Interventions using Generative Social #Simulation"
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Gizmodo: Researchers Made a Social Media Platform Where Every User Was AI. The Bots Ended Up at War. “A recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands put AI chatbots in a simple social media structure to see how they interacted with each other and found that, even without the invisible hand of the algorithm, they tend to organize themselves based on […]
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The Fediverse, a network of independently run servers using the ActivityPub protocol, is #segmented by #serverblocks.
🚧 These #blocks, often based on imported #blocklists, create #echochambers and hinder message threads.
🏔️ While #decentralisation is a goal, the Fediverse’s current state, with heavy-handed #moderation and #serverblocking, undermines this principle.
👉 https://battlepenguin.com/tech/the-broken-fediverse?Fedizen.EU #Fedizen #Fediverse #ActivityPub #News
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@Greengordon @dyckron just like human narratives do in their #echochambers
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Study in French, destructuring the "anti-covid-vaccine" language used by the #farright #echochambers
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:psrllnuhypzsvmufn5gwqobo/post/3lnvnpcr2lc2v -
What a good idea, especially for anyone on social media. Let's develop our listening, comprehension, debating, and empathy skills. Here are free resources provided by UCL to do that: the "Disagreeing Well" series.
Echo chambers aren't useful or healthy in the long run, as we're seeing in global politics right now.
We need to talk to each other in the right way to make progress and make the world a better place.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/about/disagreeing-well
#DisagreeingWell #EchoChambers #Politics #Sustainability #UCL #FreeResources #SocialMedia #SoftSkills
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Concordia University: New Concordia research shows social networks are vulnerable to relatively simple AI manipulation and polarization. “It seems that no matter the topic of conversation, online opinion around it will be split into two seemingly irreconcilable camps. That’s largely a result of these platforms’ design, as the algorithms driving them direct users to like-minded peers. This […]
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Is bothsidesism killing us? (And why scientific consensus matters) - Healthy Debate https://healthydebate.ca/2023/08/topic/bothsidesism-scientific-consensus-matters/ “While the issue of #falsebalance is usually linked to how journalists represent topics, false balance is increasingly driven by #socialmedia #echochambers, the fragmentation of the news media and the ideologically motivated embrace of fringe ideas. Too often this has allowed a small cohort of vocal contrarians to have an outsized impact on public policy and public perceptions.”
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Though I was aware of how algorithms work, I bought into the belief that there was no way the Harris campaign could fail. There was too much on the line and at stake, and how could so many experts in my feed be wrong?
https://buff.ly/4gH57Aa -
Yeah, what they don't realize is: That is the way #echochambers are born.
#Defederate with this, defederate with that.
Imagine that user also blocking everyone except themselves? Then they'll only be able to listen to themself 😆 🤣
