It has been called FlipFeed and this extension has been designed to infer the political beliefs of a user based on their feed and then show them the feed of someone who holds entirely different and opposing views. FlipFeed has been creating by the MIT's Laboratory for Social Machines. According to the researchers, the goal of the project is "to explore how social media platforms can be used to mitigate, rather than exacerbate, ideological polarization by helping people explore and empathize with different perspectives." Once it is installed, this extension is fairly easy and simple to use. All the users have to do is open Twitter and select "flip my feed" from the left side of the screen underneath their profile. This will convert their feed to another users' who, of course, has opposing political views.
the best thing about using this extension is that is appears to generate the feeds, which are those of actual Twitter users, based on the accounts they follow. thus, it becomes easy for twitter to see what you are following and then show you feeds according. if you follow a lot of "left-leaning" accounts, the extension surfaces the feed of someone who follows "right-leaning" accounts to show you something entirely different from your own account and justify the FlipFeed purpose. When it was tested for accuracy, it took a few attempts for twitter to come up with feed that looked markedly different from the main users’ feed but users have the choice to cycle through as many feeds as they want or switch back to their own at any time.
They can spend hours going through feeds of others who do not share the same views and get to know what people have to say about their political views. Even, they can find out feeds by dissertation writing service providers to get information. It is necessary to know that these researchers at MIT are not the only ones or the first ones to come up with this type of tool but this is the first time that someone has some up with something for twitter instead of focusing on Facebook. This will be very interesting to see how it works because while it might not be able to change opinions and make people change their perspective, it would still be very interesting to see how people experience change of political views on twitter.
Users need to know that social media is actually just like a bubble and they cannot remain with one opinion of one thought for a long time. There are also times when they will have to agree with some or disagree with some posts or thoughts that people post but instead of seeing what they like, knowing what other people hold or believe if also very interesting. With FlipFeed, MIT researchers have tried to work hard and help. The idea behind this is to get people outside their social media safe places or chambers and bring them closer to users with different political views. Social media had become very popular but it had also gained a reputation for locking people into these filter bubbles rather than helping them understand the perspectives of others on the outside.
This extension was created by the Laboratory for Social Machines at the MIT Media Lab and it was powered by deep learning and social network analysis. The main aim of this project was “to explore how social media platforms can be used to mitigate, rather than exacerbate, ideological polarization by helping people explore and empathize with different perspectives.” There are many people who think that this filter bubble issue is a serious problem and when users use social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, it’s easy to create a feed full of content that aligns with their own ideologies instead of something new and different and this feature has troubled Facebook in particular. This fact was particularly noticed during the US presidential election and there are many people who believe that Facebook’s filter bubble and the proliferation of fake news on the social network led to misinformed voters.
FlipFeed has found a solution by showing people content from a new vantage point.However, it is not clear which Twitter APIs the group from MIT is using and twitter also invested $10 million into this MIT lab that uses media and digital media data to study social patterns. As part of the investment, Twitter granted MIT “full access to its real-time, public stream of tweets,” so it’s possible the lab is taking advantage of that relationship for the FlipFeed project. Greylock Partner and former Twitter employee Josh Elman tweeted about the feature that even though all the info is public with the choice to follow anyone you want or see what they tweet, it is powerful to others it felt like a privacy violation.
As yet, there has not been any update from the team that has worked on FlipFeed but a representative has said that the creators of chrome extension will give interviews once they wrap up some changes they are working on. It still remains to be seen what more changes this chrome extension will bring and if it would really help users use their Twitter accounts as they want and get an unbiased political picture.