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Bubble Trouble: Strategies Against Filter Bubbles in Online Social Networks

  • Laura BurbachEmail author
  • Patrick Halbach
  • Martina Ziefle
  • André Calero Valdez
Conference paper
First Online:
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 11582)

Abstract

In the recent past, some electoral decisions have gone against the pre-election expectations, what led to greater emphasis on social networking in the creation of filter bubbles. In this article, we examine whether Facebook usage motives, personality traits of Facebook users, and awareness of the filter bubble phenomenon influence whether and how Facebook users take action against filter bubbles. To answer these questions we conducted an online survey with 149 participants in Germany. While we found out that in our sample, the motives for using Facebook and the awareness of the filter bubble have an influence on whether a person consciously takes action against the filter bubble, we found no influence of personality traits. The results show that Facebook users know for the most part that filter bubbles exist, but still do little about them. Therefore it can be concluded that in today’s digital age, it is important not only to inform users about the existence of filter bubbles, but also about various possible strategies for dealing with them.

Keywords

Filter bubble Echo chamber Avoidance strategies Big Five Facebook usage motives 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Nils Plettenberg and Johannes Nakayama for their help in improving this article. We would like to thank Nora Ehrhardt and Marion Wießmann for their support in this study. This research was supported by the Digital Society research program funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the German State of North Rhine-Westphalia.

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© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Human-Computer Interaction CenterRWTH Aachen UniversityAachenGermany

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