The Impact of Facebook's Filter Bubble on the Dissemination of Fake News and its Implications for Journalistic Ethics

Abstract

In 2016, the result of the American presidential election and Referendum in the United Kingdom shocked the journalist all around the world. Social networking sites are now blamed for the construction of the filter bubble. Filter bubbles played a key role in handling, distribution, and dissemination of fake news stories. Consumer’s beliefs and the online behavior of the users themselves explicitly impact the performance of such algorithms. The objective of the study was to find out how filter bubble increases susceptibility to believing and sharing fake news and is applying the filter bubble a violation of journalistic ethics. Ten fake news on the Kashmir issue were selected as a sample size. The data was collected from the fact-checking website “ALT News”. The key findings of this study are that reality and Representation can produce a chain of thought in human mind. Representation can excite another idea in human. For Peirce, the inquiry process is a habit of a mind. For instance, following inquiry process individuals may think a certain news story is a fair representation of an incident. At the same time, other individuals might dismiss it. The habit of belief or disbelief can have a potential effect on users’ behavior such as sharing, believing and liking a storyThe study results reflect the thing that platforms of Social media i.e. Facebook, 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.