I hate to burst your bubble, but it’s time to burst your bubble (of information).
TRIGGER WARNING: mentions of gun violence, psychosis, pedophilia
I’ve been exposed to a lot of new beliefs during my first two months of college. Some of them are a little ridiculous; for example, women shouldn’t leave the house past 8 P.M. to ensure their safety. Others are incredibly intelligent, like the point that humans are becoming a geophysical force on the planet rather than simple inhabitants. Regardless of your opinions, all the views that you’re exposed to deserve to be thoroughly investigated, or you risk being entrapped within an echo chamber.
What Is an Echo Chamber?
C. Thi Nguyen, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah, defines echo chambers as “a social epistemic structure in which other relevant voices have been actively discredited.” Basically, an echo chamber is what’s formed when opposing views are distrusted and rejected. Think of anti-vaxxers and their refusal to trust scientists when they state that vaccines are safe. Or, think of climate-change deniers and their staunch belief that the planet is not undergoing massive and deadly changes. These individuals are simply the latest inductees into echo chambers where they’re taught to mistrust popular media, the government, and science.
In the age of social media, echo chambers are increasingly prevalent. Most people are consistently exposed to different beliefs online. However, the issue isn’t exposure but trust. Echo chambers survive because members of an echo chamber are told to distrust the views of nonmembers. Echo chambers use tactics such as disagreement-reinforcement mechanisms to verify members’ trust in the echo chamber. Disagreement-reinforcement mechanism refers to the phenomenon where members of an echo chamber use the existence of contrary beliefs as proof of their views. For example, imagine that I am a cult leader and I have told my followers that everyone outside of the group is a lizard. I also told my members that the lizards want to destroy our group and they’ll use pejorative terms such as “crazy” and “lunatic” to undermine us. When nonmembers inevitably tell members of the group that they are irrational, the claims that I made are verified since I predicted a response of nonmembers. Since I’ve been right before, members feel more comfortable trusting me. These mechanisms of knowledge formation allow for echo chambers to be created and thrive. Social media, although enabling a constant flow of information, can enable the formation of echo chambers because algorithms track our likes and dislikes in order to recommend similar content. The curation of social media feeds allows users to create a bubble that could encourage echo chambers.
The Impact of Echo Chambers
You might be wondering what the big deal is. After all, these aren’t new facts. It’s common for people to hold strong opinions and distrust others who disagree with their opinions. In fact, we all filter what we’re exposed to on some level. For example, I’ve ended friendships because people were racist and sexist. To an extent, information filtration is natural. However, most people don’t distrust other people’s views simply because they disagree. Normally, there is some process where we consider the facts that others have presented, make our rebuttals, concede what we must, and come to new conclusions. In echo chambers, facts are not reviewed for the purpose of altering members’ beliefs. They’re reviewed to substantiate members’ beliefs. This can have real impacts on actual people.
Let’s take a look at the community of individuals who believe that they’re being stalked by dozens of people at once; these “targeted individuals” organize around the stance that they’re the targets in a conspiracy to harass and control thousands of ordinary American citizens. With social media, they’ve built online forums that encourage members to distrust psychiatrists, co-workers, family, and friends who tell them that their belief is false. Their belief causes genuine despair for themselves and their families. This despair can also lead to violence.
In 2014, a targeted individual walked into a library at Florida State University and shot three people after being pushed to the brink by the belief that he was a victim of gang-stalking. It’s important to note that people with psychosis are not usually violent, but sometimes those who experience psychotic episodes are more likely to act on hostile thoughts than people who don’t experience psychosis.
Another prominent example of the impact of echo chambers is Pizzagate, or the belief that certain code words and symbols proved the existence of a child sex ring based in a D.C. pizza shop. The rumors about Pizzagate made headlines and trended on Twitter for a long time. These rumors spurred one man to walk into a pizza shop with an assault-style weapon and search for underground tunnels that would lead to captive children. He aimed to rescue these children from their captors. Upon finding no evidence of an underground child sex ring in the nation’s capital, he surrendered to the police.
These examples illustrate that we often forget there are real people in these online echo chambers, and the information they receive and believe have far-reaching consequences for others.
Escaping Echo Chambers
It’s admittedly difficult to escape echo chambers. They’re built to discredit outside information, so exposure to new ideas won’t help (in fact, it would probably make it worse). Regardless, the issue of echo chambers isn’t information but trust. Members of echo chambers trust other members. In order to escape, they must trust people outside of their echo chamber. For example, Derek Black managed to escape a right-wing echo chamber because an outsider gained his trust and engaged with his problematic beliefs through conversation.
Alternatively, members of echo chambers can completely reboot their belief systems, but this requires far more effort and is unlikely unless the echo chamber proves itself to be untrustworthy.
In my opinion, the best way to escape an echo chamber is to actively ward against falling into one. As a society, we’ve disregarded basic fact-checking because we receive so much information at once. Moving forward, we must check the validity of claims we see on the Internet, open ourselves up to discussions with all people (especially the ones we disagree with) and challenge our own beliefs. Otherwise, we’re all at risk.