Media Law Post #8


Ryan Smith

The Twisted Malice of Echo Chambers

Today I want to talk about Echo Chambers, how dangerous they can be, and how easily they can be used and exploited with a few tactics, mostly in the context of Twitter. While I mainly will be talking about echo chambers, I will be briefly bringing up a couple of the other terms that were possible choices due to them being tactics that help maintain echo chambers and will lead to a better explanation.

An echo chamber is defined as an enclosed online space in which you only find opinions equal to your own and nothing else. You may understand what the definition of an echo chamber is now, but how do they stay intact? One of the tactics used by Twitter echo chambers is blocking. While it may seem very straightforward and obvious, here is how that works in depth. If someone has a differing opinion than someone in an echo chamber, and that person is blocked by them, they can no-longer see or reply to the tweets from the person in the echo-chamber. This leads to the blocked person with only two options. They can either post on their own feed and get little to no attention from the audience of the person who blocked them, or they can give up entirely. This kind of censorship is one of the tactics that keep echo chambers going, as all opinions that someone doesn't like can be removed with the click of a button so they can stay in their "safe space".

Another tactic that echo chambers use is called "ratioing". This is when someone posts a tweet, then someone with a much larger following posts a reply to that tweet that gets much more attention, usually in the multiples or even higher, in order to "invalidate" the original tweet and make the original poster either delete the tweet, or keep it up and feel humiliated. The worst possible instance of this is with "woke" culture and false allegations. The "Believe All Victims" movement is not only an egregious example of the Illusory Truth Effect, but also doesn't even fit its name to its goal. The name of the movement sounds good in theory, but in reality the meaning is to believe all allegations, which is incredibly nonsensical and unhealthy because you're already taking a side without hearing the full story and possibly siding with a false allegation. This is the worst possible example of a ratio, if someone publishes a fabricated allegation and gets a huge influx of support from it, then the real victim, that being the accused, publishes a response of their own with evidence the the allegation was false, they can be ratioed by the mob of people who sided with the false allegation and effectively invalidate the truth due to the confirmation bias that they have at that point. It's sad to say that this has happened countless times before.

It's sad how many people know that they are in an echo chamber and decide not to do anything about that and stay in that enclosed area without any differing opinions. Criticism is a part of life, and you can't live your entire life in a safe space where no one will think any differently than you.

Source:

What is an Echo Chamber? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se20RoB331w&ab_channel=GCFLearnFree.org

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