SOCIAL MEDIA

“Echo chamber?” Not on my FB feed…

I wish my problem was too much “information and opinions that reflect and reinforce my own”

“Echo and Narcissus” by John William Waterhouse, 1903

Social media “echo chambers” get a lot of attention, but I can tell you, that’s sure not what I’m being subjected to on FB. Wikipedia defines an echo chamber as “an environment where a person only encounters information or opinions that reflect and reinforce their own.”

Uh, nope. That’s not my experience. The information and opinions that reflect my own are generally suppressed by social media. The news sources I want to follow are shadow-banned. The subjects that interest me are censored by algorithms.

Here’s a partial list of what interests me that social media won’t show me:

• anti-war views of US foreign policy
• critiques of US bipartisanship
• news about Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba and other not-so-capitalist countries, from not-so-capitalist perspectives
• analysis of Russia that isn’t rehashed cold-war propaganda
• analysis of China that isn’t thinly veiled sinophobia, and which includes honest coverage of their COVID policy, which might be the most effective in the world
• fact-based…