The 4th V of Big Data?

A recent study by a team of Facebook data scientists undertook a review exploring whether the social network was isolating it’s users from different political viewpoints. More specifically the issue being put under the analytical lens was whether or not Facebook's filtering algorithm keeps people from reading news and opinion they may disagree with given the sites propensity to show you things you “like” rather than those you do not. Importantly as is being asked as result, what impact does this have on opinion forming and then indeed general democracy?

“The study finds that on average, around 23% of a user’s friends will be of a different political affiliation, and an average of 29% of News Feed stories will present a user with an opposing viewpoint. Meanwhile, Facebook says that the filtering algorithm itself is more affected by which stories a user clicks on than by anything Facebook itself does. In other words, it’s bad, but not as bad as Facebook’s worst critics fear” says Business Insider.

However the critics don’t necessarily agree. Enter Christian Sandvig, a Microsoft research scientist who writing on his research blog “Social Media Collective” attacks the polarizarion this filtering is creating as “polarization is bad”. This view being based on the “wide consensus that exposure to diverse news sources is foundational to democracy. Scholarly research about social media has–almost universally–expressed concern about the dangers of increasing selectivity and polarization. But it may be that you do not want to say that polarization is bad when you have just found that your own product increases it. (Modestly.)”

It is this then that could lead us to the 4th V for consideration within Dig Data. The authors of the paper from Facebook titled “Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook” (Bakshy, Messing and Adamic) discuss the changing social landscape and importantly due to filtering the creation of so called “echo chambers” in which “individuals are exposed only to information from like-minded individuals” and as such could be devoid of impactful attitude changing content.

Successfully managing the challenges of 'Volume', 'Velocity' and 'Variety' do we then also need to be conscious of the 'Vacuum' that perhaps the data has been collected in? Unless a consideration it may lead us a down a path of insightful customer preference where in reality there hasn't really been a choice.

http://socialmediacollective.org/2015/05/07/the-facebook-its-not-our-fault-study/

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2015/05/08/science.aaa1160.full
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/facebook-news-feed-study-2015-5