Young people perceptions of content personalisation on social media: a user study

The way in which social networking sites are constructed —providing personalised interfaces through recommendation systems— disrupts how users access and process information as well as, more fundamentally, the processes that form their opinions. In this context, we take on an interdisciplinary perspective mixing media studies, science and technology studies and computer science to examine the relevance of the "filter bubble" theory. This theory asserts that customizing the recommendation and classification of content based on users' past behaviour reduces the proportion of conflicting opinions that are visible to them, thus facilitating the creation of so called “echo chambers” (Sunstein, 2009) or “filter bubbles” (Pariser, 2011).However, several studies invite us to question the validity of this theory (Bruns, 2019; Dahlgren, 2021; Dubois & Blank, 2018; Moeller and Helberger, 2018; Mutz and Young, 2011; Zuiderveen Borgesius et al., 2016). More than trying to identify specific bubbles or quantify them, our work aims at understanding how teenagers and young adults perceive these mechanisms. To understand the relationship between these systems and young users (15-25 years old), we have analysed the discourses of teachers, media experts and young users on this topic gathered during 21 interviews, 19 focus groups and 13 in praxis interviews in Brussels. Our results show that young users have various degrees of understanding of the different mechanisms operating for each platform. If most perceive filtering mechanisms to some extent such as content classification on their Instagram feeds, others don’t and feel that they will find “more diverse” information by scrolling through social networking sites than by watching television or listening to the radio. The fact that the workings of these technologies are completely known to them also brings up fantasized representations such as cross-platform data transfers (for example how watching something on Youtube will influence what appears on other platforms). When it ...