Social Media Bias: Dissenting Views

Ideally, greater exposure to diverse ideas and more opportunities for fact-checking would result in a more educated public. However, I was very interested to see — as this article states — that the proliferation of the internet and various social media platforms can, in fact, foster willful ignorance and distortions of reality.

Rather than pursuing information for the sake of accurately understanding reality, people shop for niche communities that share beliefs similar to their own. The conclusion has already been formed — only a quick search online is needed to produce the evidence to back the assumption. Dissenting views are quickly undermined and dismissed. In this way, confirmation bias is amplified as people tailor the type of websites