Information Inundation on Platforms and Implications

Abstract

Information Inundation and Polarization In the paper “Information Inundation on Platforms and Implications,” Gad Allon, Kimon Drakopoulos, and Vahideh Manshadi study the process of learning and opinion formation in the presence of platforms. The paper is motivated by the relatively recent changes in how people access and consume news. Specifically, more and more people access news through social platforms, such as Facebook, Reddit, or Twitter. The paper tries to answer a simple question: why is it that we become more polarized even though we have more information sources than ever? In this paper, the authors assume that people are almost rational and are not easily biased as a result of psychological biases. Yet the authors show that, even if people are good “statisticians” in the sense that they try to find the information that reduces their ignorance by the most significant amount, they choose to consume information that slows their ability to learn. In fact, the authors show that screening information sources results in polarization: everyone is sort of “stuck” in their side of the political map. We are essentially illustrating a mechanism that generates confirmation bias even for a seemingly rational reader.