FlipFeed is the name of a recently released Chrome extension designed to burst your social media bubble and allow you to see opposing political views on Twitter. Due to the nature of social networks, people’s feeds are usually filled with one-sided opinions and content from users who have a similar outlook on life to their own. The creators of FlipFeed believe that a diversity of opinions is important, which is why they’ve developed this extension which enables you to see Twitter through the eyes of someone who doesn’t share a lot of political views with you. To use FlipFeed, simply download the extension from the Chrome Web Store, install it, open Twitter, and navigate to your Twitter profile. From there, click the button beneath your profile picture and you’ll be taken to a feed of another user whose ideology isn’t similar to that of your own.
All feeds presented by FlipFeed belong to real people that the service has labeled as adhering to either right-leaning or left-leaning ideologies. In this way, you’re able to exit your echo chamber of choice and see how people with differing opinions are experiencing Twitter. FlipFeed was developed by the MIT Media Lab’s Laboratory for Social Machines and people who decide to try out the extension are asked to send feedback to its creators. This curious social experiment is powered by deep learning technologies and algorithms for analyzing social networks. As such, the service is able to determine your political orientation and present you with a Twitter feed of a user with a completely different set of views.
The creators of FlipFeed are trying to come up with a way to use social media networks to reduce political polarization among people as most contemporary social platforms are currently doing the opposite. The issue of online echo chambers recently became so serious that Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel even tried to use it to pressure Facebook and Google to reveal their search and advertising algorithms which she believes threaten public discourse. It remains to be seen whether FlipFeed can help combat that unfortunate side-effect of contemporary social media platforms, but if you’re interested in trying it out, you can do so by following the link below.