Social Medi A New Haven For Discussion, Free Speech, And...

From the time that social media was first introduced, whether we talk about Facebook in 2004 or the â€Å"ancient† times of GTalk and MSN, the virtual world was seen as a new haven for discussion, free speech, and breeding ground for new ideas. Twitter introduced the hashtag circa 2007, which allowed categorizing a similar set of materials together. For instance, if a user wishes to look at pictures of animals, they can simply type in â€Å"#animals† in the search bar. Within seconds the user will be presented with millions if not billions of pictures from all over the world. Hashtags are primarily seen as an element that groups people together, rather than dividing people. The world has seen the effective use of hashtag plenty of times ranging from†¦show more content†¦People are forced into these filter bubbles by the social media giants. A study was done from a statistical standpoint by Seth Flaxman, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, Sha rad Goel, an assistant professor in the at Stanford University, Stanford and Justin M. Rao, senior researcher at Microsoft Research, where they examined the browsing histories of fifty thousand users in the US who draw their daily news through social media. It was found that people mostly clicked on what was recommended to them by the algorithm. They were unknowingly becoming a part of the echo chamber problem as â€Å"algorithms inadvertently amplify ideological segregation by automatically recommending content an individual is likely to agree with† (Flaxman et al 299). The study concludes that â€Å"individuals generally read publications that are ideologically quite similar, and moreover, users that regularly read partisan articles are almost exclusively exposed to only one side of the political spectrum† (Flaxman et al 317). If people surround themselves with only confirming views they will never know what the other side stands for. In more recent times we saw an a bundance of new news sources come up, which are more share driven than factually. The news sources online only cares about the number of likes, retweets and shares, they can easily put a hashtag followed by some â€Å"news† to please either side. The United States saw this bridge get larger, with the