Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg insists there's no news "filter bubble" trapping users of the popular social media platform onto a feedback loop that keeps out dissenting views.
During a second-quarter earnings call with analysts on Wednesday, Zuckerberg argued that users' news feeds on Facebook are more diverse than traditional media,
Business Insider reports, citing a
transcript of the call.
"Facebook is actually, and social media in general, are the most diverse forms of media that are out there," the CEO told one analyst.
"The way to think about this is that, even if a lot of your friends come from the same kind of background or have the same political or religious beliefs, if you know a couple of hundred people, there's a good chance that even maybe a small percent . . . will have different viewpoints, which means that their perspectives are now going to be shown in your News Feed," he added.
"And if you compare that to traditional media where people will typically pick a newspaper or a TV station that they want to watch and just get 100 percent of the view from that, people are actually getting exposed to much more different kinds of content through social media than they would have otherwise or have been in the past."
BI reports Zuckerberg was apparently referring to 2015 research that, according to
The New York Times, showed an average of almost 29 percent of the news stories displayed by Facebook's News Feed also appear to present views that conflict with the user's own ideology.
There were critics, however, BI reports — including academic
Zeynep Tufekci, who argued the research was conducted on "a small, skewed subset of Facebook users."
Facebook "is becoming the dominant platform for news distribution across the globe, far more powerful than any single media outlet," BI's Rob Price writes.
"If users don't understand why they're seeing certain posts and not others, and how the decisions of Facebook's algorithms can shape the civic discourse, then that's a problem."
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