Hey guys. Today I want to share a phenomenon I've observed. Have you ever felt that people are getting more extreme online and they seem to have disagreements on almost everything?

Recently I met up with a friend who I haven't seen for a very long time. She likes this K-pop star who I also know of. I listen to their songs and stuff, and recently this girl that she likes seems to have something going on with this other girl from the same group, which triggers massive arguments from fans on both sides because she posted about it on social media. So I asked her about it on that day, and she immediately got so emotional and angry, and I was a bit confused then because I just don't understand how you could have so much hate and such extreme emotions towards someone that you've never met in real life before. Like, you barely know her.

And then I went online to see the other side of the story, which is equally mad. And the interesting thing is both sides seem to have 100% confidence to claim that they are right and the other side of the story is completely made up and wrong.

And this makes me think of a concept called the echo chamber effect. With the help of technology, every one of us can access a lot of information, but we all only see a tiny bit of the entire thing. From an economics perspective, our attention is a scarce resource. We only have 24 hours a day, but the amount of information that can be created is almost unlimited. So the platforms need to decide what kind of content deserves to be there on your screen. Every like you click, every share, every comment is essentially telling the algorithm what content you like, and they will continue to push the same kind of content to appear on your screen again and again.

At the same time, as humans, we also have to be mindful about the presence of confirmation bias. In simple terms, it's basically that we tend to notice and accept the information that is in line with our original perceptions of things. So with these two things combined, they create a feedback loop. We tend to accept the information that supports what we already believe, and the platform continues to generate such content for us, and then we continue to seek evidence that backs up our original ideas from this new content that got pushed to our screens. So every one of us seems to have a different side of the internet and a different side of the whole story.

I think this can partly explain why the discussions online are becoming hard to carry forward, because when we're talking about the same thing, me and you could have a very different factual base already, which is exactly like my friend and the fans on the other side. If we are immersed in the information that we like all the time, we would develop a very strong logical chain that's very hard to convince us otherwise. And research even shows that even if you increase your exposure to information from the other side, this doesn't automatically solve the problem, because when a perception is already so tied to our own identity and emotions and the groups that we belong to, this could alter the way that we process information.

So I think, with this era of the bombardment of information, our ability to filter information is becoming increasingly crucial. Sometimes we need to be aware of what channels of information we're getting from, and are there some perspectives that we just block off or have never noticed before. Because the internet knows what we like to do, and we want to see what we want to see, we want to hear what we want to hear, but what we want to see and what we want to hear may not necessarily be the best for us.