Jan 29, 2018 3 min read

Facebook is bad for democracy.

Don’t take our word for it. The social media giant admitted as much to users last week.

Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook’s civic engagement product manager, wrote in a blog post on the company’s website that while the social media platform has allowed people around the world to connect through extraordinary advances in technology, it also has stifled the expression of competing ideas by locking users into their own personal echo chambers.

“Facebook was originally designed to connect friends and family – and it has excelled at that,” Chakrabarti wrote in the post. “But as unprecedented numbers of people channel their political energy through this medium, it’s being used in unforeseen ways with societal repercussions that were never anticipated.”

That’s quite an understatement.

The platform that launched in late 2003 was supposed to be a way for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to meet women while attending Harvard. Over the years, it’s changed to become a family album for doting grandparents to see newborn babies from afar, or a way to share vacation photographs taken at far-flung destinations.

As the company has expanded exponentially to billions of users across the globe, something strange has been happening in Facebook’s “News Feed,” with complex algorithms that pick and choose what shows up on your screen. If you “liked” something, then similar posts and stories show up in your feed.

Unfortunately, insulating people and having them see only posts that are agreeable to them has caused a societal rift in which we no longer are exposed to ideas that don’t correspond to our own. No wonder the 2016 presidential election was so bitter and divisive.

The Facebook feed also has allowed misinformation to spread unchecked in viral posts that place the same weight on rumors as hard news investigated by reputable journalists. There is a reckoning happening within Facebook on what constitutes “fake news” and how to combat it.

“We recognize that the same tools that give people more voice can sometimes be used, by anyone, to spread hoaxes and misinformation,” Chakrabarti said. “There is active debate about how much of our information diet is tainted by false news – and how much it influences people’s behavior.”

As bad as misinformation, the echo chambers are even worse. And there’s no escaping them as long as we still have our noses in our phones.

“It’s natural to seek out information that confirms what we already believe – a phenomenon social scientists call ‘confirmation bias,'” Chakrabarti admitted.

While Pandora’s Box may already be open when it comes to technology and social media, there is only one solution: Get off this so-called social media and socialize with others in the real world.

The sooner we all get out of our own comfort zones and hold face-to-face conversations with someone who disagrees with us, the better our country will be as a whole.