My forever-politicised newsfeed

Reading posts of my groupmates who were failing to find any political discussions in their news feeds, I already knew that my Facebook would show radically different picture. Considering the fact that I’m from Ukraine, country that recently has gone through revolution and now going through war, it’s not a surprise that my news feed is full of politics.

For this assignment I decided to count all the posts from my news feed on one particular day and find how many of them are political. Here are the results:

As we can see from the pie chart, 66 out of 157 posts were political (42%), while 91 (58%) were connected to other topics. To the group of ‘political posts’ I included: news disseminated by mass media, posts from different pages (e.g. Facebook page of Ukrainian Ministry of Defence) and status updates of my friends/people that I’m following  - all of which were touching political issues as well as starting political discussions.

Frankly speaking, I was sure that the majority of posts in my newsfeed are connected to the political situation in Ukraine, so the results that showed relatively low amount of such information (42%) surprised me. Probably this gap between my expectations and reality happened because I generally do not focus my attention on non-political news (except the updates from my close friends)? Or maybe the character of my newsfeed has shifted just recently - after I moved to the Netherlands and added a lot of new people, who are not interested in Ukrainian affairs, to my friendlist?

Turning to the content of political posts, I found out that they hardly confront my political views. It is not surprising: as long as we can choose which mass media, Facebook group or person we want to follow, we will get expected result in our newsfeed. The only exception here – the content provided by our friends. Fortunately or not, but I cannot show such examples as political posts from my friends were not contradictory to my own opinions.

Even though my newsfeed is not so politicized as I expected, I believe that it still contains much more political messages than newsfeeds of many of my classmates. In this context I should say that this informational shift on my Facebook happened suddenly. My newsflow in social networks also used to be full of ‘funny’ pictures, lifestyle-articles and so on. Of course there were a few voices of political activists that I followed in that flow, but generally Facebook was not a platform from which I gained political information, as it is now. Obviously, my newsfeeds in social networks became so politicized after the beginning of the revolution in Ukraine and for so far it is not likely that they will ever be light and entertaining again.

P.S. This is the first political post on my page in Instagram. On the foto you can see a small picture that policemen gave to me during the revolution in Kyiv. Date: January 2014