The Problems of the Social Media Echo Chamber

By now, the ideal dream of consuming a wide array of sources to understand a diverse range of opinions and cultures should have been fully realized.

Where do you get your news and information around the world? By now, the ideal dream of consuming a wide array of sources to understand a diverse range of opinions and cultures should have been fully realized.

So why does it feel like we are soaking up an ever-narrower range of information? Why does it feel like every news story out there, and every response to it, perfectly matches our own prejudices?

Blame the internet. More specifically, blame social media and the echo chambers that we have built inside them.

In the mid-1990s, the promise of the early internet was to connect divergent communities from across the world–to surface the kinds of events and opinions that, though we may find challenging, would yield greater global understanding.

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