It's really, really hard to see in yourself when you're being turned into an extremist by an echo chamber. It's a self feeding cycle. The more extreme you get the more extreme your filter bubble becomes. It looks normal to you at any point in time. It happens slowly over time and it's hard to notice. If you're lucky one day you go to smoke it up with your hippie friends and you realize they're all talking about bail reform, solar power and sustainable ways to raise beef and you're talking about toppling statues, silencing wrongthink and seizing the means of production and realize that something has changed. Some people realize they've been radicalized and step back. Others think their friends have gone soft and double down on their new ideology. Most will never see the change because it happens so slowly.

Well, that's the problem, isn't it? People are increasingly retreating into echo chambers that present no contradictory opinions. And now those echo chambers are being used to slip in incorrect facts and twisted opinions. People increasingly accept outlandish positions and the whole political spectrum is getting more polarized.

CNN documented that the Russians pushed propaganda on both sides, once having helped plan a protest and a counter protest at once. Their plan to disrupt democracy is very much helped by echo chambers.

Aren't echo chambers mostly self organizing? I just see this as a general problem and not something unique to Facebook.

Culturally we seem to be moving increasingly towards echo chambers as we are losing the social skills to be capable of engaging in dialog without immediately collapsing into emotional rants.

Exactly. Facebook isn't dramatically different than your local pub, church, Elks lodge, knitting club, or any other self-selected social group. Singling them out and treating it like a new problem gives too much credence to the notion that it's a new thing.

Think today's politics are divisive? Look back to the mass social unrest and violence of the entire 20th century (or farther, at all of human history). This is not a new phenomenon, and there's nothing unique about Facebook, the Internet, social media, or technology.

Except its millions of times bigger in its scope and reach. That makes it qualitatively a different thing entirely

> Exactly. Facebook isn't dramatically different than your local pub, church, Elks lodge, knitting club, or any other self-selected social group. Singling them out and treating it like a new problem gives too much credence to the notion that it's a new thing.

No. Facebook (and web echo chambers in general) are dramatically different. Because the available online population is so much larger than a physical community, narrower and louder echo chambers are possible. Back in the offline days echo chambers were more self-limited and internally more diverse, because the smaller pool of possible members meant too much exclusion would make the group too small to be sustainable. Now, every crazy fringe idea can have a Facebook group of 500 active members egging each other on, and use targeted ads to easily suck in every susceptible person.

When you can create "lookalike audiences" and target political ads at people that will feed off their fears it's quite easy to see what the problem is.

That's exactly the problem. Facebook bubbles tell you your view is just fine as it is, and in fact you should probably radicalize your view to better conform with the click worthy voices you hear.

It is not so much about changing the beliefs of a potential voter as modifying their behaviour. In this case giving them enough of a reason to stay at home rather than vote. As the article states:

  > During the campaign, Trump used Facebook to raise two 
  > hundred and eighty million    dollars. Just days before
  > the election, his team paid for a voter-suppression 
  > effort on the platform. According to Bloomberg 
  > Businessweek, it targeted three Democratic 
  > constituencies—“idealistic white liberals, young women, 
  > and African Americans”—sending them videos precisely 
  > tailored to discourage them from turning out for Clinton.
  > Theresa Hong, the Trump campaign’s digital-content 
  > director, later told an interviewer, “Without Facebook 
  > we wouldn’t have won.”

But because it is an echo chamber it steers them into more radical postures, and creates division that politicians can exploit.

It is not about changing minds, it is about angering and motivating a certain segment of the population to vote.