Five ways to burst your social media bubble

For a new Radio 4 documentary, DJ and presenter Bobby Friction attempts to burst his social network bubble. Here he gives five tips for how you can take control of your timeline.

When I started making my documentary earlier this year on social media bubbles and echo chambers, little did I know that a personal fascination would become one of the defining stories of this most revolutionary of years. I was concerned about the narrowing of our online experience in a social and political sense, but as we speed towards 2017 people are now linking this effect with Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and a possible Armageddon just around the corner!

Most of us on social media have evolved into very neat, very narrow and very agreeable echo chambers

Through no fault of our own, most of us on social media have evolved into very neat, very narrow and very agreeable echo chambers; people with massively different social and political views just don’t appear on our timelines, even if they live on our streets and next door to us. I blame the social media companies’ algorithms, the coding that is programmed to show us more of what we like online and more of what we agree with, weirdly enough to make us happier. Well that worked out well didn’t it…

After speaking to experts, online gurus and futurist philosophers, here are my five ways you can burst your social media bubble and join me in a brighter and possibly more real future.

Bobby Friction on Twitter

1. Turn off your curated feed now!

Facebook shows you a timeline created by their algorithms, so what you see on your timeline is what they think you want to see and are interested in. This often means your friends who think differently to you on any news topic might not always appear on your timeline. Your exposure to different viewpoints narrows and the echo chamber effect grows. Turn on the setting for “Most Recent” on your news feed, which is really hard to find and you have to do it every time you log on. It means you’ll be bombarded with stories that might mean nothing to you, friends who you don’t really know that well and LOTS of pictures that bore the life out of you. But you will at least have a real-time timeline.

2. Click “like” on everything

By liking everything on social media you’re telling the artificial intelligence behind the social media pages that you like everything, every point of view and every kind of politics. This way your echo chamber will at least be echoing everything back to you, including both sides of the story. It’s a very clumsy way to beat the system, but at least you’re trying.

3. Don’t click on links

Limit your clicks to birthdays and pictures. Just keep politics and social issues out of your social media world full stop. Once you’ve made your online life as dull and as beige as it can be you can then use the old skills we used to use in libraries and start surfing the search engines to read every point of view on a political story, from different kinds of news providers. Make your own mind up.

4. Organise and preach the gospel of the non-curated feed

It’s no use dropping out of the system if everyone else is still in the matrix. Social media companies and algorithms aren’t a force for evil trying to change our very species; they are just reflecting us back at ourselves. If we collectively change the way we consume social media, it will then reflect a more nuanced, more open and more complex world back.