Digital Media Literacy

What is bias?

• Bias is a tendency to believe that some people, ideas, etc., are better than others, which often results in treating some people unfairly.
• Explicit bias refers to attitudes and beliefs (positive or negative) that we consciously or deliberately hold and express about a person or group. Explicit and implicit biases can sometimes contradict each other.
• Implicit bias includes attitudes and beliefs (positive or negative) about other people, ideas, issues, or institutions that occur outside of our conscious awareness and control, which affect our opinions and behavior. Everyone has implicit biases—even people who try to remain objective (e.g., judges and journalists)—that they have developed over a lifetime. However, people can work to combat and change these biases.
• Confirmation bias, or the selective collection of evidence, is our subconscious tendency to seek and interpret information and other evidence in ways that affirm our existing beliefs, ideas, expectations, and/or hypotheses. Therefore, confirmation bias is both affected by and feeds our implicit biases. It can be most entrenched around beliefs and ideas that we are strongly attached to or that provoke a strong emotional response.

Credit: Facing History and Ourselves: Confirmation and Other Biases, Lesson 3

• 11 Cognitive Biases that Influence Political Outcomes Infographic and article 

• AllSides.com See issues and political news with news bias revealed. Non-partisan, crowd-sourced technology shows all sides so you can decide.

• All Sides Media Bias Chart: Multiple charts are available. See "Should you trust media bias charts article" below for additional information.

• Blue Feed, Red Feed See Liberal Facebook and Conservative Facebook, Side by Side: Created by Wall Street Journal, this site shows the biases and differences between similar stories on Facebook

• Consumption of News Sources: Pew Research chart of percentage of respondents who got news about politics and government in the previous week from each source

• Should you Trust Media Bias Charts: Poynter Institute article investigates media bias charts

• Interactive Media Bias Chart: See "Should you trust media bias charts article." Check their "Resources" for special educational resources to use in your classroom. (Ad Fontes Media)

• Think Tanks aka groups or institutes that advocate or perform research about specific topics: Guide listing conservative and liberal think tanks

• Ideological Placement of News Source's Audience: Pew Research Center's chart of news sources and the political orientation of their audience.

• Media Bias / Fact Check: Rates and verifies the bias, accuracy, and credibility of media sources.

• Helpful article: 20 cognitive biases that screw up your decisions (Business Insider)

• Types of Bias Charts: A Google search of images of bias charts, ranging from simple to very complex. The variety of charts is amazing!

What is a "filter bubble"?  The term refers to an intellectual or mental space in which we allow only what we want to see and hear.  Our filter bubbles reinforce our own notions of what is true, even in the face of information that challenges our bubbles.  View the following video to find out why it's not only important, but also vital, for us to burst our filter bubbles as often as possible.

Social media and web search engine algorithms are deliberately opaque.  Algorithms often reinforce our existing biases. Unline media stories, how these tools distribute fake news is not open to scrutiny.  In this opinion article from New York Times, "How to Monitor Fake News," Tom Wheeler suggests a way to open up social media algorithms to public scrutiny without compromising individual privacy.

• An algorithm is a precisely defined set of mathematical or logical operations for the performance of a particular task [in this context, by computer]. Source: Oxford English Dictionary Online.
• Challenging the Algorithms of Oppression Video. Safiya Noble is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Studies in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA. In her PDF 2016 talk, Noble explains why we should care about commercial spaces dominating our information landscape.
• Filter Bubbles & Echo Chambers
• TED talk by Eli Pariser: https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles?language=en (from 2011) The Filter Bubble: how personalization changes society: Review and critique of Eli Pariser's The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You
• Fun facts from the new Facebook filter bubble study: Facebook’s new study on the filter bubble has lots of interesting tidbits on how liberals and conservatives consume content on the platform.
• How Facebook News Feed Works
• How to POP your Filter Bubble (a TED Talk Playlist): https://www.ted.com/playlists/470/how_to_pop_our_filter_bubbles

This video from the Southern Poverty Law Center shows how the Google searching algorithm effectively narrowed the perspective of Dylann Roof because he searched for white supremacy information. In this example, other points of view were not represented because the Google search results privileged hate sites.