Social Polarization

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According to Oxford Reference, Social Polarization is the splitting of a society into two distinct groups that are different ends of a spectrum. On August 2016, Facebook fired all the human editors for Trending and replaced them with an algorithm that promotes stories based entirely on what Facebook users are talking about according to Ars Technica. This was in response to criticisms that its Trending feature was surfacing news stories that were biased against conservatives. However within 72 hours, according to the Washington Post, the top story on Trending was a fake story about Fox News icon Megyn Kelly saying that she was fired for being pro-Clinton traitor and several more fake stories have appeared on the Trending news bar as a result …show more content…

According to Facebook's newsroom, the algorithm curates your list of topics according to personalized factors such as the pages you like, your location, and previous trending topics with which you've interacted, and what is trending overall. This promotes social polarization through confirmation bias. If all the posts that a person like's is conservative then what Facebook's algorithm will feed you will also be conservative news. This leads to only accessing information that conforms to ones beliefs further increasing ones views on a topic thus further increasing social polarization. If Facebook were to have their algorithm provide not only content that they feel the user would read but also counterpoints or different perspectives on those topics then I believe this could reduce social polarization and avoid allegations of …show more content…

However, it should be noted that this is a team of engineers who were told to accept every trending topic linked to three or more recent articles, from any source, or linked to any article with at least five related posts according to the Washington Post. So not only are they not trained as editors to check the authenticity of stories but they were also instructed to accept basically anything. Another argument against actually using humans would be that it can be considered censorship and I would agree as this is a form of censorship called content filtering. However, I would argue that the consequences of filtering content as opposed to not filtering content is more positive because by filtering content it would reduce misinformation and social polarization. One might say that this content filtering should be regulated. However, I don't believe any of Lessig's modes of regulation would be usable as they would either be unfeasible or have

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