As Ellen Meng ’26 opens TikTok after hours of Zoom classes, she scrolls through video after video of the trending opinion of the government’s incompetence in handling the pandemic. As her fingers continue flicking upward, her screen blurs into a mixture of progressively hateful content, including a video of a teenager’s desire to overthrow the government. Suddenly, she looks up, a wave of fog clouding her mind. Was it thirty minutes or an hour since she started consuming this content? Worried, she begins googling the context for these opinions, eager to enhance her knowledge with a new perspective.
The internet provides various avenues for individuals to become immersed in different social niches and communities. Whether through the promotion of content that aligns with one’s views by an algorithm or through personal choice, Meng says that, taken to the extreme, the internet becomes a space where individuals are only exposed to opinions that reinforce an individual’s existing beliefs, a concept known as echo chambers. According to the University of Oslo, echo chambers are most commonly shown to exist in online media such as blogs, forums, and social media sites.
A Pew Research Center survey on news and social media found that an adverse consequence of using sites that aren’t solely for providing information content, like social media, is the exposure of individuals to groups that more or less reflect one’s own identity and opinions. For example, news consumers on Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, X, and Reddit tend to be younger and more Democratic-leaning than those on other sites, whereas news consumers on Facebook, YouTube, and Truth Social tend to be overwhelmingly Republican-leaning. Meng reflects on the power of political biases on the internet which aim to adopt polarized opinions.
“If you’re in a classroom, it’s not guaranteed that everyone in there will have your exact views, but online, you can seek out communities that have the exact same views as you, and then it becomes a niche that gets pushed to the extreme,” Meng said.
Based on Meng, individual biases may mirror those present in many online platforms due to personal choices in media usage, such as selective exposure rather than a platform’s algorithmic control over one’s media usage and content. Yet librarian Jami Lopez finds that the opposite may be true with social media algorithms. With minimal control over what media algorithms display, those who have developed a trust in media over their lifetimes have not learned when, why, and how to discern the credibility of sources. Lopez especially sees this with older generations compared to younger ones.
“It was hard to gain access to information back then,” Lopez said. “[Older generations] never had to worry about trust. Now they have access to anything and everything they want, and they don’t question whether or not they should trust it.”
In these cases, Meng finds that algorithms may play a substantial role in bringing an individual towards extremities of thought. Many studies such as one titled “Carol’s Journey to QAnon” where researchers created fake accounts on Facebook found that recommendation systems led to feeds containing hate speech and conspiracy groups such as QAnon within weeks or even days. In order to avoid radicalizing feeds, Meng advocates for taking action towards minimizing the extreme content one views by hiding or reporting content, one of them being a misogynistic social media influencer Andrew Tate.
“In the past, I have seen one Andrew Tate YouTube short, and I swipe past it, but I kept getting more and more,” Meng said. “It took me actively saying, ‘I don’t want to see more of this content’ for them to finally disappear. So while the individual chooses what to engage with, algorithms definitely bring you deeper and deeper into an echo chamber.”
Even with certain platforms being hesitant to fix their algorithms that radicalize users unless serious consequence such as hate speech occur, as demonstrated by the “Carol’s Journey to QAnon” study, librarian Toni Gorman asserts that the ability to think critically about what’s presented in the media is key to not falling victim to echo chambers. In other words, if students do not actively seek out information, Gorman feels they risk limiting their worldview to the most presented and socially acceptable perspectives.
“In some ways, people have less of an understanding of the importance of seeking out ideas,” Gorman said. “With the online environment today, we tend to just wait for ideas to come to us right through our feeds and through whatever we happen to run into online.”
Meng points out that seeking out diverse opinions also may have the power to mend the divisiveness between people both in online and real life scenarios. She argues individuals can only foster healthy discussions and interactions once they are able to find validity and legitimacy in opinions different from one’s own.
“Echo chambers remove empathy, because it prevents you from seeing things from other people’s points of view,” Meng said. “It’s like us versus them. And no problems really get solved if you’re fighting each other, rather than identifying an actual problem and working towards that.”
Beyond social and intellectual obstacles, Meng stresses that echo chambers may be a distraction towards greater societal progress and civic involvement. She worries that many individuals through echo chambers engage too heavily in ideas that have minor implications for society.
“Echo chambers isolate people from real world problems and distort their idea of what a real problem is,” Meng said. “There’s a lot of people who are very, very sensitive about tone tags and they say if you choose not to use tone tags then you’re ableist. But if someone chooses not to add ‘slash serious’ at the end of every sentence, that’s not going to affect greater society.”
Additionally, Meng suggests that teens may be susceptible to becoming stuck in a loop of these extreme ideas, as they are less willing to be wrong and succumb to ideas of those around them. As a librarian, Lopez feels it is her duty to teach young students the usage of the internet as a resource for reputable journalism and information. Lopez finds it critical to ponder questions as a way to evaluate what someone is seeing online.
“Mrs. Gorman and I try to work with the classroom teachers in integrating information literacy skills into their classroom,” Lopez said. “I don’t think it’s surprising to anybody to know that misinformation exists. And so, the real important skill is how we sift through that and find reliable information to avoid manipulation.”
As society has increasingly blurred the lines between real journalism and “news influencers”, a term referring to influencers that upload current event content on social media, teachers, and librarians like Lopez are becoming more aware of their responsibility to educate people about the media. This discrediting of journalism, Gorman notes, creates the false narrative that all media sources can be relied on for providing content of equal quality and credibility, leading many users down a path of misinformation.
“There’s a lack of understanding in society about journalism and what journalists do and the fact that journalism is a profession that abides by a code of ethics,” Gorman said. “It’s crazy to me that the term news influencer even exists, that there are news influencers who don’t have degrees in journalism. It is really important that we view true journalists as different from just YouTube content creators or news influencers.”
From Gorman’s perspective, the internet hosts a good, reliable information landscape created by reputable journalists that users should rely on more often. Yet although this healthy consumption offers a good solution to involvement in echo chambers, Meng proposes that sometimes an individual may just need to take a step back and let their usage of the internet be framed as a tool rather than a whole livelihood.
“As a general rule of thumb, it’s good to experience the real world more than you experience the internet,” Meng said. “I totally understand that people want to curate an experience for themselves. I just feel like the internet shouldn’t be used to shape your core beliefs.”