Safiyyah's blog

After listening to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism podcast : The truth behind filter bubbles by Richard Fletcher (2020), I have been enlightened on a topic I never would have thought held such immense significance in our lives. Filter bubbles.  What is a filter bubble, you may ask? A filter bubble is a state of intellectual or ideological isolation that may arise from algorithms feeding us the information we agree with based on our past behaviour and search history. However, there are advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, it's incredibly convenient to find specialised content targeted towards your own personal interests. For example, I could open up TikTok and instantly land on a video that piques my interest. But on the other hand, filter bubbles can produce cognitive biases and create an informational barrier around people. Doing so prevents them from seeing opposing points of view, resulting in a very narrow-minded train of thought. Critics of the filt...

Credits Greg Johnson Penn Today There is a missing perspective in COVID-19 news and that is of women.  Women have been left out of many things over the years. Although there is now more equality between genders than there was 50 years ago, we have not reached total equality yet. The gender pay gap still exists. There is an enormous und errepresentation of women in the news. Take the coronavirus, for example.  A report commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, "uncovers a substantial bias towards men’s perspectives in both newsgathering and news coverage of the pandemic, spanning across all regions." It demonstrates the gravity of the exclusion. Across the globe, women have been left out of crucial decisions related to the coronavirus, so what happened to equality? Statistics from AKAS analysis show that in England, there is not one woman in the COVID-19 response decision-making bodies. Countries like the US and Nigeria follow closely with the majority of t...