A game-based educational experience to increase awareness about the threats of social media filter bubbles and echo chambers inspired by “wisdom of the crowd”: preliminary results

Social media are a game changer in the communication arena in terms of quan�tity, quality and origin of information users are exposed to. Yet, it’s not clear the outcome of multiple and continued interactions between users and information personalisation systems. These systems may skew the distribution of content and contacts presented to the users. If users are unaware of such mechanisms their perception of reality especially may be distorted [1–3]. Digital citizenship, intended as the proper and responsible use of digital tech�nologies [4], and media literacy could enable users to critically approach social media and deal with its threats [5–9]. We propose that a preliminary training with respect to social media threats is needed for students and that merging educational activities with a guided, direct, and game-oriented experience of some social media threats [10–13] could be an effective method to raise students’ awareness of the impact of complex phenomena, such as information personalisation, social influence, filter bubbles, and echo chambers [14, 15]. Our intuition is that through direct exposition of one of the most impacting echo-chamber and filter bubbles consequences, i.e. when biased sampling distorts users’ unbiased opinions, and its explanation, the students will become more aware of these mechanisms and their effects