Birds of a Feather: Homophilizing your Facebook News Feed

Are you more or less likely to become friends with those that share your interest? Are you more or less likely to follow people on Twitter you find particularly stimulating or address similar hobbies you've managed to accumulate? Are you always clicking "Like" when you see something you enjoy float across your News Feed?


If you've answered yes to any of the above you are engaging in the act of homophily, something you might not even have been aware of. The basic idea is that individuals have a tendency to associate and bond with similar others. Research on homophily and how it relates to social network theory can be found in the work of McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook's work, "Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks".


A recent study, entitled Social Networking Sites and Politics, by the Pew Internet & American Life Project generated data that supports the idea of homophily on social media. Approximately 18% of all users of social networking sites have blocked, unfriended, or hidden someone because of the political content that they posted.

However, there are outliers. They are rare. My fellow intern and partner in grad school misery, Matt, hides more people he agrees with than he disagrees with. Could it be then that he subconsciously rebels against the push homophily gives and Facebook’s algorithms reinforce? Maybe. Or maybe, like me, he craves information from disparate sources. Homophily, every spy’s worst enemy.


His stance is quite the opposite of most, but commendable. A push back against the algorithms that Facebook uses to accelerate homophily within our digital networks is necessary if we want to see the full picture. Studies of mass media in the Communications field have revealed that we are more inclined to reach towards partisan broadcast news sources. A not so surprising corollary of this is the boost the 18-30 age demographic gives to television viewership of shows like The Daily Show and the Colbert Report, and influence these programs then have on their viewers. We watch what we like and what we watch reinforces our view of the world. Now, social media has allowed us to further the trend towards ideological isolation.


The dangers of homophily perpetrated by search and social media algorithms for Democracy has been keenly documented by Mathew Hindman. In his book, The Myth of Digital Democracy, he navigates the Internet’s broader structure to reveal emerging information gate keepers. Homophily is not only at work when we actively click “Like” or de-friend on Facebook, but also in the aggregation of key words by Google as it crawls through the Internet. Our reliance, potentially over-reliance upon search engines like Google to get at information on the Internet is leading to a state he defines as “Googlearchy”. This new situation we find ourselves in as information consumers can undermine the free exchange of information, a tenant so necessary to Democracy’s ability to thrive and grow.


Cass Sunstein, in Republic 2.0, reiterates the points Hindman makes about the Internet in general by way of the American political blogosphere. Here he finds greater segmentation than anticipated between left and right wing bloggers, and more importantly a similar segmentation of the audiences. Liberal leaning readers preferring only left wing bloggers and vice versa. His concerns for the health of Democracy stem from citizens and voters perpetuating the cycle of ignoring information and view points that contradict their own.


Can polarization of American digital political discourse be blamed on a single word? I don’t believe in miracles, but it’s difficult to argue with human nature.