Introduction

Social media has revolutionised the original ideas of community, wherever I am. Whereas people can travel the world to join in many online groups, it seems society does not do the same with its discourse. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Reddit are not only social platforms to share things and find out new information, they constitute how we do things with new information. Most of the news we get through the Web is incidental, finding it by accident while surfing, and is influenced by personal algorithms. These elements have reconstituted how these current online communities are formed and work. The entire building of these networked media has therefore produced a sense of fragmented belonging in which people use networked media to maintain these social connections. Still, their attention and loyalties are fractured in these gated sets, which tailor media feeds. Based on the theoretical framework and examples, it critically examines the effects of algorithmic filtering and ‘news finds me’ on community cohesion in terms of their framework and the contradiction between those features that foster community and those that lead to isolation. The paper is in conversation with the literature on sustained community, incidental news, social implications of the technology (societal, 2020), and the social media’s effect on community and information sharing (i.e. research 2020–2024).

Literature Review: Community in the Social Media Era

From Moral Panic to Persistent Community: Concerns about the effects of new communication technologies on community cohesion are not new. Hampton and Wellman (2018) discuss a recurring “moral panic,” where each generation fears “the decline” of close-knit communities due to technological advancements. They note that many commentators idealise a past of supportive communities while perceiving modern social connections as weaker, overlooking the persistent inequalities that have always existed. In social media, there are fears that online platforms and smartphones diminish authentic community engagement. However, Hampton and Wellman argue that this deterministic view is incorrect; rather than eroding community, social media fosters new forms of networked community. This simultaneous participation may appear as a fragmentation of belonging. Still, it does not equate to losing it, aligning with networked individualism, where one’s social landscape consists of diverse, loosely connected networks.

Incidental News Consumption: People face the news until they participate in the news. This is an important part of the social network environment. BOCZKOWSKI et al. (2018) The accidental news consumption was found online for other reasons (understanding of accidental news consumption in social networks). News articles are mixed with memes, personal updates, and other content on sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Other feed parts (consideration for news consumption on social networks). He has lost his father as a people’s leader and has become a source of other content, and he is randomly spending and carefully paying attention as if it is news from newspapers or news broadcasts. BOCZKOWSKI et al. It is also important to consider the transition from gatekeepers and news filtration to editors, algorithms, and news that society determines. Participants who participated in the study often function as a third filtration class outside professional journalism by creating news for friends and acquaintances on social networks (understanding of accidental news consumption in social networks). This practical thing means that if something is important, that is, my way of thinking about news and findings, someone in my network will share it. The epidemiology of personal networks on the news fairs directly impacts the information basis of the community through this epidemiology. In the community of social networks (ie, Facebook’s friends group, congestion), people will see and discuss news, such as strengthening external prospects and the group’s common knowledge.

Algorithmic Filtering and Echo Chambers: Platform algorithms underpin persisting networked communities and incidental news flows. Proprietary algorithms drive social media feeds on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, reinforcing content likely to appeal to each user. While these algorithms are useful for building a personalised and convenient experience for the users, the scholars are worried about filter bubbles or the echo chambers, in which the users find only content, which best suits their current attitude or ideology, reinforcing their stubbornness (dLib.si – Habitual generation of filter bubbles). Kaluža argues that algorithms and user habits support each other: the narrower the exposure, the more likely the system will feed back to the user to fit that content into their habits (dLib.si – Habitual generation of filter bubbles). Finally, Kaluža concludes that algorithmic filtering, heightened by commercial interests of engagement with the audience, affects the decline of the public sphere, in that the public sphere is fragmented into the audience’s separated news realities (dLib.si – Habitual generation of filter bubbles.

Analysis: How Design and Incidental Exposure Shape Online Communities

Algorithmic Design and the Fragmentation of Communities: Online platform design determines how the community is formed and interacts. News feed algorithms, recommendation systems, group structures, and others that can create division and unity among users can be promoted. For instance, the Facebook news feed algorithm prioritises posts from friends and pages to which you are prone to interact, and thus, tends to present users content from their closer circles. As a consequence, within communities, you can get uniformity: a person who is always active in the parenting groups will hardly ever see extremist political content, whereas a politically involved person will see more and more partisan posts. The experience will be different. Instead, social media binds together physically distanced people commonly overlaid around a shared interest for ‘partial commitments to several social milieus’ instead of in a single community. Therefore, you may join a local Facebook group, read your country’s news on Twitter, say something at a local hobby community on Reddit or interact with colleagues on LinkedIn; each platform holds these special connections. This means an individual has fragmented contexts where they belong to several communities, but the belonging is mediated through the different platforms’ environments, followed by their norms and algorithms.

However, this results in a more unitary overall public discourse becoming more fragmented. One report put it so: online users tend to group themselves in polarised groups that adhere to information that supports their worldview and ignore information that does not conform. Design facilitates this pattern: Algorithms push people the content they once engaged with (propelling their worldviews), while features such as groups and hashtags allow like-minded people to self-segregate into enclaves. The way of designing the platform will either widen or narrow the scope of communication. For instance, Twitter’s design permits following of strangers and being exposed to trending topics far afield of one’s own circle to inject more cross-cutting content into the feed. Whereas Facebook places much more emphasis on connections to friends and group memberships, interactions may be more insulated. Then in a subreddit, communities exist with their own moderators (or none), rules (which may not be explicit or small sections of the parent site policies and rules), and a certain level of reputation (the general popularity being observed by users of the sub). This reduced the impact of unreliable sources roughly by half (The COVID-19 social media infodemic). In stark contrast, the alt-network Gab, which claims to be a place for free speech with little moderation, does indeed ‘strongly amplify’ misleading information, making about four times more amplification of unreliable sources than reliable ones (The COVID-19 social media infodemic). The difference of these show how platform governance and design affect the community information ecosystem. If algorithms and community rules are actively at work damping down misinformation (on Reddit or to a degree in Facebook/Twitter), communities can remain factioned for one proposition or another, but at least you have a rudimentary factual core in common.

Persistent Connectivity vs. Fragmented Belonging: We see a duality of how platform design and incidental news shape communities together with these threads. On the one hand, we have unprecedented persistence of community in the sense that people are woven into communal life on a very personal basis, able to keep up relationships and, where they are not too busy, can coalesce around shared interests as never before. Online communities can aggregate at scale and over distances (it’s about global fan bases or transnational activist networks). The way that social media is built is basically its connective design, lowering barriers to forming communities, whether in the form of a Facebook group for your neighborhood neighborhood or a niche forum for a rare hobby. These digital communities can be very real in regards to belonging; where members feel they are supported, identity and fellowship that comes via other parameters are lesser or equal on a par. For instance, research has suggested that social media use can increase bonding and bridging social capital (Ellison et al. 2007; Hampton & Wellman 2018), which refers to gaining emotional support and new information and/or resources from one’s online community networks (Hampton Lost and Saved 2018). Hampton and Wellman claim that social media ‘creates networked, supportive, persistent, and pervasive community relationships’ (Hampton, Lost and Saved, 2018).

Furthermore, the incidental nature of much online interaction means that one’s attention and belonging are continuously shifting. A user might spend the morning in a serious discussion on a news forum, the afternoon browsing light-hearted TikToks, and the evening chatting in a gaming Discord server. Their identity and community membership flexes across these contexts. While each context might be rich, it can be argued that this leads to a more fragmented self – or at least a self whose belonging is distributed. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2000) talked of “liquid modernity.” Online life exemplifies fluid, rapidly reconfiguring social ties. The question remains: does this fragmented belonging undermine our ability to act as a society on common goals, or can the networks still interconnect us sufficiently?

In summary, platform design and incidental news consumption have together woven a complex social fabric in which communities are both empowered and partitioned. The persistent contact and pervasive awareness afforded by social media ensure that community, as a fundamental human experience of belonging, remains “persistent and pervasive” in daily life (Persistent and Pervasive community). At the same time, algorithmic curation and incidental, peer-driven news sharing mean that each community can live in its own world of information, making the collective belonging across communities more fragile. The modern online community is fluid: easy to join, easy to leave, highly personalised in experience – attributes that fulfill individual needs for connection and expression, but which can fragment the larger society into networked tribes.

Conclusion

That is to say, the work of the Twin Army and Index News in Platform Design and the significance of online communities more generally are very evident. Social media provides a framework that facilitates continuous connections among people across time and space, resulting in a resilient form of community. Persistent networks of friends, group interactions, and instant communication have brought together features such as friendships that transcend geographical barriers and have reinforced community structures. However, the algorithms and design of these platforms can be manipulated by users as algorithmic filters and engagement-driven design, so they are no longer collaborative experiences. This constant random consumption of news on these platforms often results in a dissonance in the consumption of content on these platforms. Messages that take us into an instant of collective focus on social feeds can be caught up in that they can be detached from the truth when algorithms reward useful or conformistic information and suppress dissenting points of view. The result of this paper is fragmented attribution in the landscape of online communities.

This critical examination shows that the techno-utopian or dystopian narratives do not have any space to describe the current reality. Social media hasn’t killed the online communities; it has just evolved. As Hampton notes, they are now both persistent and interconnected and can be quickly mobilised, but also tidy and fragmented into micro injuries that are often deliberately intended to disperse. Moving forward, the overarching perspective is that the dismantling or preservation of community dynamics are not the focus, but rather, platform design and random exposure have instead redefined community dynamics in a new way. It has more profound implications because the sense of belonging is more individualised. The information communities based on algorithmically curated information tend to be disengaged from one another, with the polarisation rising and the misunderstanding in society.