News Media

The announcement in May 2015 that nine news organizations, including the New York Times, NBC News, the BBC and BuzzFeed, would begin serving up some of their content natively to Facebook’s platform has been the subject of intense scrutiny in the media and publishing world.

Questions about how social media platforms may drive users into “filter bubbles” — increasingly like-minded communities whose views are reinforced and become more extreme — have been swirling for several years now. As the debate has developed in popular discourse, scholars and data scientists have continued to make insights on what is often referred to in the academic literature as online “homophily,” or colloquially as the “birds of a feather flock together” phenomenon.

Recent weeks have brought a deluge of new findings about the digital media space, crowned by the Pew Research Journalism Project’s 2014 State of the News Media report.

The issue: The media plays a well-documented role shaping public opinion and policy preferences. In a democracy, it is generally important that a government have public support before engaging in a foreign ground war.