Filter Bubble and Fake News: Facebook and Journalist Ethics

Abstract

In 2016, the result of the American presidential election and Referendum in the United Kingdom shocked journalists all around the world. Social networking sites are now blamed for the construction of the filter bubble. The filter bubble is considered an intellectual state of isolation in which algorithms are making a circumstance where consumers progressively are getting data that reinforce their prior beliefs and less exposure to contradictory viewpoints. Filter bubbles play a key role in the handling, distribution, and dissemination of fake news stories. The study’s objective is to find out how a filter bubble increases susceptibility to believing and sharing fake news and whether applying the filter bubble violates journalistic ethics. Peircean pragmatic perspective is used as a methodological approach to concentrate on concepts such as representation, reality, and fixation of belief (priori method) because this method is relatively close to what happens with the filter bubble on social networking sites. The study results reflect the thing that the platforms of Social media i.e. Facebook, and Google search engines are blamed for the false news controversy, but still, the users’ belief activity and their online presence perform a critical role in driving facebook’s algorithms in this problem.