A new study about news-seeking behaviour explains that people who choose social media to read news and seek information have higher risks of getting trapped in collective ‘information bubble’ compared to people who use search engines.

Indiana University researchers recently published in the open-access online journal PeerJ Computer Science a new study called “Measuring online social bubbles”. The study analysed over 100 million Web clicks and 1.3 billion public posts on social media and found out interesting aspects concerning the ‘social bubbles’.

“These findings provide the first large-scale empirical comparison between the diversity of information sources reached through different types of online activity,” explains the doctoral student Dimitar Nikolov, School of Informatics and Computing at IU Bloomington, lead author of the study. “Our analysis shows that people collectively access information from a significantly narrower range of sources on social media compared to search engines.”

IU researchers created an innovative method to analyse and measure the diversity of information accessed over the different media. The process assigned certain scores according to the way in which users’ clicks from social media and search engines were distributed across and redirected to millions of sites.

Higher score indicated that the traffic was distributed across many different sites; lower score, instead, meant that user clicks redirected to fewer sites. A single click on website A and seven click on website B, for instance, would generate less points, and consequently a lower score, than four clicks on website A and four clicks on website B.

The study found out that people using social media to read news and acquire information scored drastically lower in terms of diversity of their information sources when compared to users who used search engines to acquire information.

The findings express the growth of a “collective social bubble” where news are shared in restrained environment in communities of like-minded individuals, explains Nikolov, underlining a trend in the current media consumption landscape where “the discovery of information is being transformed from an individual to a social endeavour.”

Nikolov then added that people who acquire information in this way often ignore the fact that the information they are acquiring are filtered by social media communities, using as sources friends’ posts and shared contents.

“The rapid adoption of the Web as both a source of knowledge and social space has made it ever more difficult for people to manage the constant stream of news and information arriving on their screens,” explained the co-author Filippo Menczer, director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, professor of informatics and computing and member of the IU Network Science Institute. “These results suggest the conflation of these previously distinct activities may be contributing to a growing ‘bubble effect’ in information consumption.”

The study was based on three main massive sources of information concerning the web browsing. The first one was an anonymous database, compiled by the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, containing the Web Searches of 100,000 users at IU between 2006 and 2010; the second source was a dataset containing 18,000,000 clicks on the AOL search engine by over half million users in 2006; the third source, finally, involved 1.3 billion public posts containing links shared on Twitter between April 2013 and April 2014 by over 89,000,000 people.

“Compared to a baseline of information seeking activities, this evidence shows, empirically, that social media does in fact expose communities and individuals to a significantly narrower range of news sources, despite the many information channels on the medium,” Nikolov added.

Written by: Pietro Paolo Frigenti