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Comment by treis | Hacker News Reader

>The irony is that the media is doing this now, with respect to anything related to Facebook.

You could have stopped at the comma. How many people out there regularly watch Fox News and MSNBC? Or read The Rolling Stone and the WSJ? We've had partisan bubbles for as long as we've had any sort of mass media.

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Yes, but the partisanship is likely getting worse, because we each individually get the exact information that is "relevant" to us and therefore feeds our confirmation bias. It's a different form of tribalism from 1950s mass media partisanship. There's actually research (James Hamilton @ Stanford) that shows when capital costs for printing presses were higher, newspapers became less partisan because you had to appeal to everyone to be profitable. The internet, cable news, are helping to unwind that period.

As background, I've spent years writing on social media (and used to work in it):

My Media literacy guide:

http://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README.m...

A piece I did for Quartz on Selective Facts:

https://qz.com/1130094/todays-biggest-threat-to-democracy-is...

And my data analysis of the NY Times (with an example in social media):

https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html

>Yes, but the partisanship is likely getting worse, because we each individually get the exact information that is "relevant" to us and therefore feeds our confirmation bias. It's a different form of tribalism from 1950s mass media partisanship. There's actually research (James Hamilton @ Stanford) that shows when capital costs for printing presses were higher, newspapers became less partisan because you had to appeal to everyone to be profitable. The internet, cable news, are helping to unwind that period.

I definitely think it's true that mass media has become more partisan. But, as you note, it's not coming from social media. It's coming from the cost of delivering content being driven to practically zero while simultaneously being able to reach nearly everyone in the world.

Yes, but the partisanship is likely getting worse

This I disagree with. It's bad, but nowhere near as bad as it was 50 or 100 years ago.

It used to be that most cities had individual newspapers aligned with each party, and sometimes with factions within that party. Those newspapers had to moderate themselves when economic pressures forced mergers, which is why so many newspapers have hyphenated names.

For example, at one time the Los Angeles Times was so staunchly pro-Republican that it didn't even report the results of Democratic primaries or candidates.

I agree with your general perspective. I'd guess that the further back in time you go, the stronger filter bubbles were. One hundred thousand years ago when we all lived in tribes and clans was arguably peak filter bubble. These relatively small groups had their own histories, languages, religions, traditions, etc., and often lived in isolation from everyone else. The diversity was probably staggering. Impossible to imagine. Just look at how alien and unique a place like Japan can get after a bit of isolation.

Today we're quite homogenous by comparison. People on both sides of the aisle believe more-or-less the same things, but we zoom in on the tiny differences and exaggerate them. The media does its best to facilitate this, because its business model depends on eyeballs, and eyeballs are driven by novelty and controversy.

Is it? We've had tabloids here in the UK for years, and it seems the more extreme ones have generally had higher circulation numbers than their more moderate rivals. And the media here have been aimed at partisans for a long time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGscoaUWW2M

Social media is slightly different in that content is catered to the individual, so I'd guess that it does a slightly better job at siloing people. It also allows others on the platform to provide the catered content as opposed to the media corporation providing you with their political vision (although I'm not sure which is better or worse).

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