Why I decided to rate the news

In 2016, during a contentious presidential campaign, I watched with dismay as my Facebook feed, once a lifeline for communication and information sharing, devolved into a partisan battleground as “friends” ideologically bashed each other with one-sided articles designed to turn emotion into clicks. 

I’m in a same-sex marriage and the once reasoned, heartfelt Facebook exchanges I’d been having with a conservative friend turned dark. Initially, I explained how marriage-denying laws impacted me personally. He was engaged to a woman, so my personal story about not being able to get legally married actually impacted him. But in 2016, he started posting increasingly vitriolic articles, videos and memes, and he eventually unfriended many of our mutual friends. The possibility for conversation was gone.

At the same time, I started to take notice of my own one-sided media diet: I spent an hour reading the same three partisan websites each day that reinforced my worldview  — all of which I had discovered via Facebook. My information diet had been curated by algorithm and reinforced by habit. However, I still engaged with enough people across the aisle to notice something: Sometimes I’d share a point I thought was common knowledge and end up shocked that the person I shared it with had never heard it before. Then it dawned on me that my political opposite was doing exactly the same thing and living in a completely different reality than me.