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The reason is that social media users often get their information from the same sources.
Researchers from Indiana University (USA) decided to find out how diverse are the sources from which Internet users in general and, in particular, social networks, receive information and news.
To do this, they developed a method that made it possible to compare how many sites users of search engines and social networks follow links to. Users were given a score based on the variety of sites they visited. For example, if out of 10 clicks a user clicked on links to news sites, he clicked once on CNN and nine times on MSNBC, then he received less conditional points than another user who visited each of the sites five times.
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The scientists analyzed three databases, one of which contained information about the search queries of 100 Internet users from Indiana University from October 000 to May 2006. The second database collected data on which links users of the AOL search engine followed in 2010 (a total of 2006 million clicks). Finally, the third dataset was 18 billion Twitter posts that were open to the public and contained links.
In general, the analysis of these data showed that social network users have a much more limited set of information sources than those who receive news and other information mainly through search engines.
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The lead author of the study, Dimitar Nikolov, a graduate student at the School of Information Technology at Indiana University Bloomington, explains this by the emergence of “information bubbles” within which there are online communities of people with similar opinions. He suggests that the emergence of such “bubbles” has become a kind of protection against information overload. At the same time, users who are inside the “bubble” (which role can be played, for example, by a circle of friends on Facebook) are far from always aware of how much it limits and filters the information and news that comes to them.
“In a short period of time, the Web has burst into our lives, becoming both a source of information and a space for social interaction. It is becoming more and more difficult for users to keep track of the endless stream of information and news. Our results show that the social and informational functions of the Web are increasingly overlapping, resulting in “bubbles,” says study co-author Filippo Menczer, professor and director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research at Indiana University’s School of Information Technology.
Подробнее см. D. Nikolov et al. «Measuring online social bubbles», PeerJ Computer Science, December 2015.