Social Media — An Echo Chamber for politics

The impact of social media in politics has been discussed a lot.

Users posting aggressive and extreme opinions receive more attention and invoke more sentiments.
To get things viral, you have to hit the extreme spot of sentiments, which is leading to dangerous opinions getting an opportunity to reach millions of people. To be sensational, viral, you can’t use logic or data, instead, you need to be full of sentiments, and provoke the same sentiments in the readers. The more extreme the opinions are, the more attention it gets, the more people it reaches. Slowly and slowly, all these websites are filled with content provoking only sentiments, and data takes a backstage position.
Sentiments quite easily dominate logics and data in such situations.

The other issue is of social media providing an echo chamber of opinions to its users.

Social media of all sorts provide a platform where you get a feed or recommendations of content which you have watched or liked before. Well, that’s the work of a recommender system, present aggressively in all social media platforms.

The problem though is, that you are stuck in an echo chamber where you are bombarded with content on which you agree.
You constantly and continuously consume the content having similar opinions, having similar aggressive tones.
Which reinforces your beliefs and opinions and gives you the (over) confidence that whatever you believe and whatever you are saying is 100% true, and others, who have a different set of opinions are either stupid or don’t have a complete understanding.

This is leading to a strong polarization in opinions and people reaching extremes.
This is damaging!

Instead, these platforms should provide a window where you are allowed to listen to the other side of the debate. Some sort of leakage in the current echo chambers.

I feel the impact of such improved systems can be huge and can help a lot in giving people the opportunity to better judge and adjudicate the debate.

Hence I request everyone reading this to please question everything they hear or read.
Irrespective of whatever you believe in, always think of yourself in a debate with the things you read and try to question it.
Use your own mind and logical analysis before sharing anything and everything which just supports your cause.