If you’re trying to prove that social media is an echo chamber, a great opportunity is to survey sports fans during a lead-up to a major competition.
My team, Liverpool Football Club, meets our Premiership rival, Tottenham Hotspur, tonight in the Champions League final. It’s a huge occasion for both clubs and their sets of fans.
But these past few weeks, what I’ve seen on my social media feeds (Facebook and Twitter in particular) are 90 – 95% Liverpool-related news only. I’ve seen training updates by our club, match previews, video highlights of our road to the final, tactical breakdowns and more.
Then it struck me. Where’s all the news about Spurs?
I know I have a few loyal Spurs fans on my Facebook list. But aside from their individual posts, I don’t recall seeing much from football publishers or news outlets about our rivals during this period. And on Twitter, where articles are shared so quickly and so much, I’ve also found little mention of Spurs team news on my feed, not even videos which you would think are usually shareable.
It’s not that no one is writing about Spurs, of course. This skewed content distribution is due to algorithms that are designed to optimize engagement. They surface to you the type of posts or news that their data has shown will most likely get you to watch or leave a reaction, based on your interests and past behavior.
Because I’m a Liverpool fan, naturally I end up seeing more of those updates in my feed. If I want to find out more about our opponents, I would have to proactively search for that information. But would I do that? Maybe. Would the majority of other fans do that? Probably not because they are not even aware their social feeds are being curated like that.
This is just a football final though. Social media echo chambers have a much greater and far-reaching impact when it comes to other issues, such as politics and policies. But that’s a discussion for another time. Meanwhile, I’ve got a big game tonight that I need to catch.