BuzzFeed News has launched a new feature which will appear on its most shared articles called “Outside Your Bubble,” an attempt to give our audience a glimpse at what’s happening outside their own social media spaces.
In a post called “Helping You See Outside Your Bubble”, BuzzFeed editor-in-chief, Ben Smith said: “The Outside Your Bubble feature will appear as a module at the bottom of some widely shared news articles and will pull in what people are saying about the piece on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, the web, and other platforms.
“It’s a response to the reality that often the same story will have two or three distinct and siloed conversations taking place around it on social media, where people talk to the like-minded without even being aware of other perspectives on the same reporting.
“Our goal is to give readers a sense of these conversations around an article, and to add a kind of transparency that has been lost in the rise of social-media-driven filter bubbles. We view it in part as a way to amplify the work of BuzzFeed News reporters, and to add for readers a sense of the context in which news lives now.”
BuzzFeed has included the ‘Outside Your Bubble’ feature on article about Twitter temporarily decreasing the reach of tweets from users it believes are engaging in abusive behavior via a new protocol that began rolling out last week. At the bottom of the article appears a box with six different alternative views on Twitter’s decision including concerns about how keywords are assessed, isolating Twitter users with different users and people leaving the platform in response.
