Should We Worry About Filter Bubbles

By F. Z. Borgesius, Damian Trilling, Judith Moeller, Balázs Bodó, C. D. Vreese, Natali Helberger. 2016

482 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Some fear that personalised communication can lead to information cocoons or filter bubbles. For instance, a personalised news website could give more prominence to conservative or liberal media items, based on the (assumed) political interests of the user. As a result, users may encounter only a limited range of political ideas. We synthesise empirical research on the extent and effects of self-selected personalisation, where people actively choose which content they receive, and pre-selected personalisation, where algorithms personalise content for users without any deliberate user choice. We conclude that at present there is little empirical evidence that warrants any worries about filter bubbles.

Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science, Recommender Systems, Social Sciences & Humanities

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Communication

1. Fabio Giglietto
2. Atte Oksanen
3. Markus Kaakinen
4. Iina Savolainen
5. Anu Sirola

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Dominic Spohr
2. Fabio Giglietto
3. Atte Oksanen
4. Markus Kaakinen
5. Iina Savolainen
6. Anu Sirola

In Social Sciences & Humanities

1. Dominic Spohr
2. Fabio Giglietto

Citations in the corpus

• Shared identity and shared information in social media: development and validation of the identity bubble reinforcement scale (2018, background): “The development of the scale was connected to the ongoing discussion about different online bubbles (Abisheva, Garcia, & Schweitzer, 2016; Bozdag, Gao, Houben, & Warnier, 2014; Nguyen, Hui, Harper, Teryeen, & Konstan, 2014; Pariser, 2011; Zuiderveen Borgesius et al., 2016).”
• Fake news and ideological polarization (2017, background): “Research from 2016 into the presence and severity of filter bubbles concluded ‘that – in spite of the serious concerns voiced – at present, there is no empirical evidence that warrants any strong worries about filter bubbles’ (Borgesius et al., 2016, p. 10).”
• Political Polarization on the Digital Sphere: A Cross-platform, Over-time Analysis of Interactional, Positional, and Affective Polarization on Social Media (2020, background): “Nevertheless, recent scholarship (e.g., Bruns, 2019; Zuiderveen Borgesius et al., 2016) has questioned the validity of concerns over filter bubbles and echo chambers, concluding that such phenomena appear to be empirically rare and less potent than commonly feared.”
• Nathaniel Persily e Joshua A. Tucker (a cura di). Social Media and Democracy. The State of the Field, Prospects for Reform (2021, background): “…discovery have perfectly diverse and healthy news diets.3 Yet we need to keep in mind that direct access and distributed discovery both create personalization, either because people personalize their own news consumption or because an algorithm does it for them (Zuiderveen Borgesius et al. 2016).”