I denna uppsats studeras Facebooks roll i politisk representation genom att se till huruvida det skapas en så kallad filterbubbla på Facebooks “Gilla-sidor”-sida. “Gilla-sidor”-sidan ger en Facebook-användare rekommendationer till nya sidor att gilla vilket räknas ut efter information om användaren. Informationen kan härstamma från det användaren har delgett Facebook via personlig information eller sidor som användaren tidigare har gillat och interagerat med. Rekommendationerna kan även påverkas av vänner på Facebook samt genom att surfa på andra hemsidor. Dessa två påverkansfaktorer har dock lämnats utanför denna studie och fokus ligger således på de två förstnämnda faktorerna. Studien tar förutom teorin om filterbubblan upp teorier som cyberbalkanisering, echo chamber och selektiv exponering för att förklara hur information kan påverka och påverkas av människors val på internet. Studien diskuterar resultat i ljuset av de stora konsekvenser som information har på medborgare och samhället i stort. Experimentdelen i studien innefattar skapandet av olika personas, eller fiktiva användare, på Facebook. Genom statistik har en så högt representerad medelanvändare som möjligt återskapats. Dessa användare har sedan interagerat med politiska partier. Sedan studeras Facebooks “Gilla sidor”-sidan med en kvantitativ innehållsanalys för att se vad som studsar tillbaka på användaren utifrån den genomförda interaktionen. Centralt i denna undersökning är att förstå den globala debatt om Facebooks roll som politiskt avgörande i det amerikanska presidentvalet som skedde samtidigt som studien genomfördes. Vid studiens startpunkt var filterbubblan något som diskuterats inom forskarvärlden och bland insatta medie-intresserade. När presidentvalet var avgjort kulminerade diskussioner om Facebooks roll som desinformatör genom att falska nyheter spreds för att påverka väljare i olika riktningar. Det fick till följd att Facebooks VD Zuckerberg gick ut med att nya lösningar skulle implementeras för att stävja detta utan att specificera hur. Denna studie har kunnat se förändringar på “Gilla sidor”-sidan som kan få konsekvenser för den politiska debatten på Facebook. Dessa förändringar har däremot inte på något sätt kommunicerats ut av Facebook. Därför tar denna studie även upp problematiken i att studera sociala medier online och efterfrågar en större transparens och förståelse för hur Facebook agerar. Resultaten analyseras utifrån två undersökningstillfällen som visar att Facebook tidigare har lyft upp politiska sidor för användare i hög utsträckning men numera skapar en mer lokalt förankrad “Gilla sidor”-sida. Författarna drar slutsatser om att Facebook i det första undersökningstillfället tydligt politiserade en politiskt aktiv användare medans en icke-politisk person inte tog del av politiska sidor i lika hög utsträckning. Studien visar även att en filterbubbla skapats utifrån blockpolitiska preferenser där mer likgiltig politisk information presenterades för en persona utifrån politiska block. Slutstatser kan dras om att förändringen som studien presenterar kommer få konsekvenser för den roll som Facebook spelat som politiskt samlingsplats. Även om studien enbart fokuserar på en plats på nätverket kan de förändringar som pekas på i uppsatsen göra plattformen till mindre politiskt engagerande hos användare och således få konsekvenser för politisk diskussion i Sverige och potentiellt världen. / This paper is about Facebook’s role in political representation. The goal of the study is to examine the occurrence of filter bubbles on Facebook’s  recommendations-page. This page is called “Like pages” and provides Facebook-users with recommendations of new pages to like and is created by algorithms that take into account personal information of the user, which pages the user has liked earlier, friends on the network and other websites the user has visited. The two latter factors however have been left aside in this study, which focuses instead on personal information and interaction with Facebook-pages.                       Besides the filter bubble-theory, this paper includes theories about “cyberbalkanization”, “echo chambers” and “selective exposure” in order to explain how information can influence and is influenced by people’s choices on the internet. The results of this research are discussed in the light of the large consequences which information has on internet users and society in general.                       The experimental part of the study includes the creating of six fictitious Facebook-profiles with help of several statistics, in order to make the profiles as representative as possible. Those profiles then interact with different political pages from Sweden. That has an impact on the recommendations-page, which subsequently is studied with help of a quantitative content analysis to see what content the user gets back, based on her earlier interactions.                       A central aim of this paper is to understand the global discussion about Facebook’s role as a political influencer in the US-election 2016, which has taken place during the same period of time as this paper has been written. When beginning this research, “filter bubbles” was something that was discussed in science and among media-interested. After the results of the election were final, the discussions about Facebook’s role as a propagator of fake-news culminated and the company was accused to have influenced voters. As a reaction to this, Facebook’s CEO Zuckerberg announced the company will find ways for stopping the distribution of fake-news on Facebook. Those consequences are already visible in this research and possible consequences on a political debate on Facebook are discussed. However, the changes that have been made on Facebook have not been communicated publicly in any way by the company. For this reason this study also discusses problems that can occur studying online-content and makes demands on a higher transparency of how Facebook’s algorithms work.                       The analysis of the results show that Facebook before the changes has recommended its users pages with political content in a much higher extent than after the change, when the recommendations-page is mainly based on local-fixed Facebook-pages. The authors draw the conclusion that Facebook, before the changes, politicized a political active user, while a political inactive user is not presented for political material in the same extent. Even a filter bubble could be observed, based on block-political preferences of the user. The authors agree upon that the changes, Facebook made will have an impact on Facebook’s role as a political forum. Even if this study only focuses on the recommendations-page on Facebook, the changes that Facebook made can make Facebook to a less political platform and potentially affect the democracy in Sweden and all around the world.

We  are increasingly turn to social media for our news consumption two related media phenomenon that influence media consumption are the “Echo chamber” and “Filter Bubble”. Echo chamber this the phenomenon that we tend to have conversation only with those that has the same likeminded as we do while Filter bubble is created by Social media and information retrieval technology that tends to priorities showing us things it already know we like. The aim of this thesis is to suggest design solution for social media that may counter the effect of “Echo chamber” and “Filter Bubble”. The precise method used on this thesis is play centric design method and both intermediate and final evaluations were done through qualitative evaluation. At the end a design solution of Viewlette game were presented. It can be concluded that the suggested design solution may have the tendency to counter the effect of Filter bubble and Echo chamber on social networking site by enabling people that has conflicting points of view to still listen to each other and understand an argument from different perspective. / Som vi i allt högre grad vänder  oss till sociala medier för vår nyhetskonsumtion, två besläktade medier fenomen som påverkar mediekonsumtion är "Ekokammare" och "Filter Bubble". Ekokammare är fenomen där vi tenderar att ha samtal endast med dem som har samma intresse som vi själva, medan Filter bubbla skapas av sociala medier och informationssöknings teknik som tenderar att prioriteringar och visar oss saker man redan vet att vi gillar. Syftet med denna avhandling är att föreslå konstruktionslösningen för sociala medier som kan motverka effekten av "Echo kammare" och "Filter Bubble". Den exakta metod som används på denna avhandling är att spela centrerade designmetod och både den mellanliggande och slutliga utvärderingen som görs genom kvalitativ bedömning. I slutet presenterades en designlösning av ”Viewlette”- spelet. Man kan dra slutsatsen att den föreslagna designlösningen kan ha en tendens att motverka effekten av “Filter bubble” och “Echo chamber” på nätgemenskap, genom att människor som har motstridiga synpunkter fortfarande lyssna på varandra och förstå ett argument från olika perspektiv.

In the age of the Internet, extreme groups have seen resurgence in the way they can communicate and recruit through the new medium whether they are white supremacists or hacktivists. Examining the history and modern behaviors of both white supremacy groups and Anonymous, this paper aims to research and answer how the different groups use the Internet to influence identities and if the methods to do so differ from the old ones and through the use of several concepts, mainly the Echo Chamber and the Filter Bubble, narrow down the effects that leads to a person joining an extreme group.

Purpose – At the beginning of this year the number of social media user worldwide was recorded to be at 3.80 billion and is estimated to keep rising (Kemp, 2020). Along with this connectivity, new concepts have been acknowledged that have caused some controversy. These concepts have been named echo chambers and filter bubbles. This study investigates how social media users experience personalisation algorithms and the perceived existence of filter bubbles and echo chambers on various social media platforms and channels. Furthermore, it explores to what extent these users make use of strategies when navigating their social media feeds and if they believe that said strategies have any effect on personalisation algorithms, filter bubbles, and echo chambers. Method – Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 participants currently studying at Jönköping University. The interviews were then transcribed and analysed using a thematic approach.  Findings – The perception of students at Jönköping University is that filter bubbles and echo chambers exist in a varying degree of visibility and commonality depending on the situation and medium. These are also experienced to be interconnected with personalisation algorithms. The experience of personalisation algorithms is mainly positive, as it allows the users to easily navigate the feed but negative implications are also mentioned.  These are isolation, the negative strengthening and creation of filter bubbles or echo chambers. However, the algorithm is not believed to be the only thing responsible for the creation. The users believe that their own navigation and strategies can have such an effect. The strategies that users use are (1) Passive navigation, (2) Source evaluation, (3) Multiple source searching, (4) Responsibility taking, and the (5) Creation of filter bubbles. The effect these have on filter bubbles, personalisation algorithms and echo chambers is helping, to an extent, alleviate some of the negative effects that these are experienced to have. However, the passive navigation and creation of filter bubbles have a somewhat opposite effect as they help the creation or maintaining of filter bubbles and personalisation algorithms. Implications – The findings in this study build on existing evidence of echo chambers being more easily formed when the topic of discussion is of a political nature, as it is described by Barberá, Jost, Nagler, Tucker, and Bonneau (2015) in their research on how echo chambers form on Twitter. Furthermore, these findings could be considered to disagree with the research of Dubois and Blank (2018) who found that people who had a high political interest were less likely of ending up in an echo chamber. Although, due to their research taking all media into account, such as television, radio, newspaper, and so forth, while the current study is focused on social media alone the comparison is a bit more difficult to make. Finally, in the study made by Seargeant and Tagg (2019), it was concluded that the personalisation algorithms are not the sole contributor to filter bubbles forming on Facebook and that the users play a key role in how their online environment is shaped. The results of this study build on their research that the users do use strategies when navigating that affect what is being shown to them on their social media feeds. However, the participants of the current study claimed that the algorithms played a pretty large role too, which is not quite in line with the research conducted by Seargeant and Tagg (2019). Limitations – The generalisability of this study is limited due to the small sample size chosen to conduct this study, although instead, it provides deeper insight into the relationship between humans and their social media platforms and channels. Moreover, a bias that should be acknowledged is that when conducting interviews there is a risk of encountering response bias, which is when the participants assume the purpose of the study and adapt their answers to fit what they believe the researcher(s) want to hear. To avoid this precautions were taken when designing the questions to make sure that they would not lead the participants in any directions.

Previous research has detailed concerns that exposure to both pro- and counter- attitudinal content on social media can result in outcomes of ideological polarization (e.g. Bail et al., 2018; Lu & Lee, 2018). However, further research is needed in order to understand the conditions under which this polarization may take place. To investigate this issue, this study utilizes a sample of 414 social media users in the U.S. to investigate the mediating effects of a) anger toward political opposites and b) anger toward oppositional social media content on the relationships between various types of political content exposure and the outcome of ideological polarization. Results revealed that both types of politically oriented anger partially or fully mediated all relationships between the explanatory variables and the outcome variable, demonstrating that exposure to all types of political content on social media can affect polarization through the mechanism of anger. Theoretical implications for the echo chamber theory and the backfire effect are discussed.

In December 2009 Google had a press release, in which they stated that they would start individualize their users' search results. This is the year individualization began, according to Eli Pariser, who also coined the expression filter bubble. A filter bubble is said to occur when a user only receives individualized feeds, causing them to only consume information that align with their beliefs and excluding them from contradicting information. The main goal of this thesis is to evaluate the existence of filter bubbles and the effects of them. In order to reach the goal, an experiment on a large social media platform is conducted, as well as a qualitative literature study. The experiment consists of fourteen bots that are assigned different behaviors which are performed on a social media platform, which expresses that they use individualization of users' information feeds. The presented results from the experiment are based on data crawled from the bots' feeds. The main finding of the experiment is that no significant filter bubbles are observed and that users experience less exclusion the more of the feed they consume. The literature study consists of 24 papers that both do and do not support the theory of filter bubbles. The main effects found are that filter bubbles fosters polarization of opinions and confirmation bias. It is also said that this could lead to undermining deliberative democracy. / År 2009 talade Google om att de skulle börja anpassa sina sökresultat beroende på vem som använde deras tjänst. Detta lyftes fram av Eli Pariser år 2011, som då myntade uttrycket filterbubbla. Pariser menar att en person befinner sig i en filterbubbla om personen endast konsumerar innehåll som är anpassat efter tidigare visade intressen och därmed blir utesluten från information som utmanar personens åsikter och övertygelser. Det är omdiskuterat huruvida filter bubblor existerar eller inte och vilka effekter som kommer av att en person befinner sig i en. Detta arbete utförs med syfte att utvärdera filter bubblors existens och effekter på både individen och samhället i stort. För att uppfylla syftet genomförs ett experiment och en kvalitativ litteraturstudie. Experimentet består av fjorton nya medlemskonton på en stor social medieplattform där en automatisk mjukvara gillar specifika inlägg under sex veckors tid. Plattformen har uttryckligen framfört att de anpassar användarens flöde av inlägg efter dess beteende. Detta flöde sparas ner för samtliga fjorton konton, två gånger dagligen under sju veckors tid (en vecka extra efter att gillandet av inlägg slutat) och analyseras sedan i jakt på filterbubblor. Genom experimentet att skapa filterbubblor på en social medieplattform hittas inga bevis på att filterbubblor existerar på precis den plattformen. Den kvalitativa litteraturstudien innebär en ingående granskning av vetenskapliga artiklar och avhandlingar inom området. I de 24 arbeten som utvärderas är det åtta stycken som anser att filterbubblor existerar. Flera effekter av filterbubblor hittas i litteraturen och en av de negativa effekterna filterbubblor kan ha på individen är att förstärka behovet att bekräfta sina fördomar. Samhället kan också drabbas av effekter från filterbubblor, såsom försvagande av deliberativ demokrati. Deliberativ demokrati, även kallat samtalsdemokrati lyfter vikten av kommunikation för att utveckla och förstärka en demokrati.

Vår studie undersöker fenomenet ekokammare och hur den manifesterar sig på svenska nyhetsmediers Facebooksidor. Vårt material består av fem opinionsartiklar från fem olika dagstidningar, samt kommentarsfält tillhörande dessa opinionsartiklar. Studiens teoretiska ramverk består av två huvudteorier: selektiv exponering och Faircloughs kritisk diskursanalytiska teori. Faircloughs kritiska diskursanalys utgör också vår huvudmetod, som vi använder för att analysera den diskursiva praktiken som sker i opinionsartiklarna och dess tillhörande kommentarsfält. Resultatet visar att en ekokammare går att tyda på nästan alla kommentarsfält, vilket kan tyda på en politisk polarisering i hur läsare konsumerar svenska nyhetsmedier. / Our study examines the phenomenon echo chamber and how it manifests itself on Facebook pages of Swedish news media. Our material consists of five opinion articles from five different Swedish newspapers, as well as the comments section connected to the opinion articles. The study’s theoretical framework consists of two main theories: selective exposure and Fairclough’s theory of critical discourse analysis. Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis also constitute as our main method, which we use to analyse the discursive practice used in opinion articles and comments sections connected to them. The result shows that an echo chamber is observable in almost all of the comment sections, which indicates a political polarization in how readers consume Swedish news media.

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Den här studien undersöker hur diskussioner på ekokammare ser ut i sociala medier. Mer specifikt undersöks kommentarsfälten i två olika länkar från den sociala länkaggregatorn Reddit och underforumet /r/Politics. Undersökningen görs i syfte att se hur diskussioner tar form på Reddit för att ge en klarare bild av ekokammare som fenomen på internet. Studiens teoretiska grund ligger i teorierna om selektiv exponering och partisk assimilering, samt i en teoretisering av hur grupper formas på de sociala medierna Twitter och Reddit. Studien använder sig av både en kvantitativ innehållsanalys och en kvalitativ textanalys, vilka främst grundar sig i argumentationsanalysen. Innehållsanalysen används först för att jämföra /r/Politics användares ställningstagande till de länkar som de kommenterar på och sedan för att möjliggöra en korrelationsanalys av arguments styrka och dess användargivna poäng på Reddit. Textanalysen görs med hjälp av begrepp från argumentationsanalysen och används för att sätta in studiens material i fem olika teman. Det mest framträdande temat får namnet Kommentarer av papegojor och beskriver kommentarer som konstrueras likadant som tidigare kommentarer utan försök till att föra något nytt till diskussionen. Överlag visar studiens resultat att responsen ser likadan ut för båda länkarna och att en stor majoritet av kommentarerna är på samma sida i argumentet. Resultatet visar också att argumentens styrka är oberoende av om en kommentar får en positiv respons eller inte. / This study explores how discussions in echo chambers take form on social media. More specifically, the study explores the comment section of two different links on the social news-aggregator website Reddit and the sub-forum /r/Politics. The purpose of the aforementioned exploration is to give a clearer picture of echo chambers as a phenomena on the Internet. The study’s theoretical background is based on selective exposure and biased assimilation theory, as well as a theorization of how groups form on Twitter and Reddit. The study uses a quantitative content analysis and a qualitative text analysis, which are both based on argumentation theory. The content analysis is first used to compare the viewpoint of /r/Politics users with the subject of the links they comment on, and then to make a correlation analysis of the strength of arguments and the arguments’ user-given points on Reddit. Last a qualitative text analysis is done using concepts from argumentation theory, which allows for the observation of five different themes. The most prominent of these themes was given the name Comments by parrots and describes comments that are constructed in a similar fashion to older comments, without an attempt to bring something new to the discussion.  Overall, the study’s result shows that the response to the two links is similar, and that both have an overwhelming majority of comments supporting one side. The result also shows that a strong argument does not necessarily mean that the comment will get a positive response.

The aim of this thesis is to study how students perceive and handle internet’s continuous flow of information in everyday life, through news report, social media and targeted advertising. By examining the students attitudes and thoughts about the extent to which they find the information they meet relevant this study seeks to understand how they find what is relevant to them and how they limit the intake of information by different combinations of selection processes. For this purpose interviews were carried out with seven university students from different fields and levels. Three categories of theories about selection processes serves as a theoretical framework for the analysis and results. The categories are referred to as external, personalized and personal factors. The external factors include gatekeeping theory, news valuation and agenda theory and the personalized factors include theories about filter bubbles and echo chambers. The personal factors include strategies to avoid information overload such as filtering and withdrawing, it also includes satisficing as a stop rule for information seeking.  The study shows that the three categories of selection processes are affected by emotional factors referred to as simplicity, interest and sensation. These drives the student to get more deeply informed. The students attitudes towards personalized information shows to be divided between if it should be more firmly adapted to each individual, or if that would increase the feeling of being monitored. In the students reflections regarding saved information emerges three feelings of negativity described as reluctance, lack of control and unease. Despite these feelings of negativity the phenomenon is accepted. Seeing that the alternative is disconnecting from modern society and life, acceptance shows to be the most reasonable alternative.