More facts and figures!

 

Welcome back to the second part of our facts and figures section of our campaign! For our second post this week, we at #burstyourbubble want to share with you some more illuminating points of reference and statistics! This time around, we will use several different academic papers – Dubois, E., & Blank, G. (2018). The echo chamber is overstated: The moderating effect of political interest and diverse media. Information, Communication & Society, 21(5), 729–745, Dvir-Gvirsman, S., Tsfati, Y., & Menchen-Trevino, E. (2016). The extent and nature of ideological selective exposure online: Combining survey responses with actual web log data from the 2013 Israeli elections. New Media & Society, 18(5), 857–87, Fletcher, R., Robertson, C. T., & Nielsen, R. K. (2021b). How many people live in politically partisan online news echo chambers in different countries?, and Kalogeropoulos, A., & Nielsen, R. K. (2018). Social inequalities in news consumption. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

So buckle up, and prepare to have your bubble burst!

In the modern age of technology and smartphones, having free and convenient access to online news creates disparities in the overall circulation of news usage due to the differences of each individual citizens regular choices and active habits. For example, only 22% of internet users in the United Kingdom are engaging with a wide variety of news sources regularly, across many platforms online and offline. Discrepancies in news consumption are somewhat aligned with differences in class, sex and gender, income, age and education, both in general (Kalogeropoulos and Nielsen 2018) and around, for example, coronavirus information (Fletcher et al. 2020b). Daily briefers hold the majority at 55%. This group includes those who use a handful of sources, whereas 23% of people in the United Kingdom do not access news daily. 31% of the United Kingdom are twitter users, however, only around half of those use the site for news (Newman et al. 2021). However, it is important to note that 10% of social media users in the UK state that they see little to no political content on social media that they disagree with (Dubois and Blank 2018). This could mean that while not in a filter bubble, algorithms generally filter out content that does not align with what the algorithm expects users to engage with. Politically, this could result in only seeing views from the one side of the spectrum.

It is estimated that around 2% of people in the UK are in a left leaning filter bubble, and around 5% are in right leaning filter bubble (Fletcher et al. 2021). This results in just over 1.35 million people in left swaying echo chambers, and almost 3.4 million people in right swaying echo chambers. Internationally, this is marginally lower than other countries, who have somewhat proportionally higher rates of filter bubbles. In other countries, approximately 10% of the population are in filter bubbles, 5% in left or right spaces, according to Fletcher et al. These statistics demonstrate how serious of a concern filter bubbles are, affecting millions of people in the UK alone, and millions more overseas.

We hope that these statistics give you an idea of the extent of filter bubbles and echo chambers! Stay tuned for more content this week, where we show you the other side of the coin, and discuss whether the threat of filter bubbles is overstated, as well as give a general overview of the debate surrounding filter bubbles!