News Finding: The other datasets, which contained identifiers, enabled the scientists to confirm that information access behavior at the community level reflected the behavior of individual users.
Paper Finding: While we wish to ultimately understand the biases experienced by individuals, the diversity measurements based on anonymous traffic data do not distinguish between users, and therefore they reveal a collective social bubble, as illustrated in Fig.
News Context: "These results suggest the conflation of these previously distinct activities may be contributing to a growing 'bubble effect' in information consumption." The other datasets, which contained identifiers, enabled the scientists to confirm that information access behavior at the community level reflected the behavior of individual users. "Compared to a baseline of information-seeking activities, this evidence shows, empirically, that social media does in fact expose communities and individuals to a significantly narrower range of news sources, despite the many information channels on the medium," Nikolov said.
Paper Context: 4 illustrates the top targets of traffic from search and social media on a typical week. While we wish to ultimately understand the biases experienced by individuals, the diversity measurements based on anonymous traffic data do not distinguish between users, and therefore they reveal a collective social bubble, as illustrated in Fig. It is at first sight unclear whether the collective bubble implies individual bubbles, or tells us anything at all about individual exposure.