Avoiding Political Eco-Chamber

Humans have a kind of complex self-concepts that they generally try to glorify themselves and their ideologies. This cognitive leaning of course does not occur in a vacuum, they are stimulated by social forces around us. Going with self-verification theory, usually feedbacks from others endorse and authenticate such behaviour. Our tendency to surround ourselves with people holding similar perspectives about the world — is served by today’s digital social forces. When it comes to political domain, such context can intensify prejudicial mindsets and create “echo chambers” that ultimately reduce the quality and diversity of opinion among large mass of people.

Echo chamber-a feedback loop, has occurred as inevitable phenomena in political domain of democratic countries, and Nepal too remain no exception. There exists a kind of demographic anxiety as people tend to cultivate more polarized views on political matters. Since they are surrounded by people and source that support their views and remain far from opposite side argument; all because of social medias like Facebook, Twitter and other. Given the fact that social media has become a means to filter-out opposing views from our personal online space — producing an “echo chamber.” In case of Nepal such scenario exists not because of people’s refusal to consider opposing perspectives, but it emerged out of negative political environment and intense political frustration among population.

To understand how echo chamber functions in Nepali political discourse, just analyse the degree of political opinions in social networking sites and how they are structured. You will find two layers: one is the biased opinion shared by intellectual group and another is the chamber (social media) which allows opinion to echo back to average audiences, ultimately planting biased view in their mind. And when they too share same biased opinions in social platform, it will reach and be consumed by other citizens with similar viewpoint. According to the study done by Andrew Guess from Princeton University ‘People are using social media to access only specific kind of information and they tend to select informations that conform their preference’. For example: Some of my friends who are radical congress had only followed and liked the people or pages in Facebook and twitter that advocates for Nepali congress, as a result they never get chance to hear opposite sides arguments. Thus chamber exists if media user receives politically inclined information from their network which amplifies and reinforces their predisposed ideology.

Political polarization in Nepal has already reached to level of large demographic divisions in country. Nepalese are extremely divided on contentious issues such as secularism, transitional justice, India or China debate — and such division are often triggered by political partisan. Partisan identification these days influence preferences about many social policy issues; nearly it functions as strong as religion and cultural factor. Such partisan comportment not only result compromise in making and execution of social policies but also disturbs the effective function of democracy.

Before the rise of social media in Nepal, only some groups of intellectual people used to get involved in political discussion, limiting the expression of biased views among upper layer stakeholders. However in post-social media society, almost everyone are producing as well as consuming prejudiced views in bytes and bytes. Today Nepalese citizens enjoy discussion in their own chamber, a sub-network within large network where thousands of people indulge with their own preferred opinion. Some cyber expert’s claims that social site design program itself favor echo-chamber, it may be true in case of marketing newsfeeds. But the structure of biased political vacuum in Nepal is created by involvement of people than digital algorithms.

Just this week, I along with ten other Facebook friends was tagged in news feed related to Dr. Govinda Kc’s movement. Some other tagged friends tend to immediately believe the news claim without any research and shared the post to spread it. They believed and shared the news because it matched their per-conceived opinion about Kc’s satyagraha. To ensure we are consuming truth and not political propaganda, it’s important to independently verify the information received through social media before sharing it with others as news. Unfortunately, very few people bother doing such research. Another research report published in Science Journal has also found that people are likely to engage and immediacy shares those informations without verification which supports their ideological beliefs. Same phenomena have doomed our political inclination, that’s why we are experiencing maximum polarization in Nepali society, in every issue.

In present context, information seekers have countless options of media outlets. To deal with such vast information surplus, consumers have to make rational choices about what to consume. Because information ripe as ideology, and it ultimately determine who you are as a person. Social media is widely renowned as interlinked platform to share opinion and democratize information to people in every corner of world. In such platform, anyone interested in political debates is expected to access wide range of perspectives and become more tolerant to opposing views. But social Medias in Nepal are not being utilised for liberal democratic debates, instead it has been a source to foster large scale political polarization in country. What we have failed to figure out till now is- how to use social media for erasing existing political prejudice, for disseminating more liberal opinions and representing our collective democratic sprit as Nepali.