People have _always_ been in self-created filter bubbles - its called Confirmation Bias.
The concern with Google and Facebook and YouTube is that they are now re-inforcing that confirmation bias even more.
NiemanLab cite a few studies here but them seem to be focusing on Google Search Results whereas things like Facebook Walls and the way YouTube recommends 'extreme' points of view on any given topic are also of concern.
Essentially a huge part of the internet is now optimising for clicks, which means targeted clickbait and sensationalism will always crowd out reasoned argument.
The problem, which is hopefully well known, but bears repeating is that our brain learns the structure of the world by repetition and exposure, and typically seem to be quite unbiased apart from this exposure.
Hence, a continuous over-abundance of content that caters to our biases will strongly affect our behavior, often even when we consciously think it's garbage. It is why and how advertising works, and probably why averages of peoples faces are seen as more beautiful than any of the faces in the mix.
In sensor tasks, the vision system ( amongst other ) can be shown to be close to Bayesian perfect in how it recovers information from sensory input, which should give pause to any argument - as those in the article - that only complete filter bubbles should be seen as such.
Even a partial filter bubble could, and anecdotally does, sometimes completely shortcut this information recovery from noisy data, as the basic "assumption" of the brain would have to be that the environment doesn't lie. Which in a bubble is no longer true.
If we were adept at living in a world that lies to us, I imagine neuropathologies that create auditory hallucinations of various forms would not be even remotely as problematic as they are. But assuming a purely statistical interpretation of the environment, it's easy to see that eg a persistent voice in your head is going to cause serious issues over time.
If you boil it all down, that is what a filter bubble becomes, a voice persistently telling lie about how the world looks and works, on average.
This in turn can lead to radicalization, distrust, paranoia, and other forms of unhealthy thought patterns, as similar mechanisms does when "statistical lies" are generated internally by our minds.
In my experience, few people are NOT trapped in a filter bubble. If you've ever moved from a conservative area to a liberal area of the country, or vice versa, you'll feel this in your interactions with people. In modern politics, it's far more difficult to find people who are able to constructively engage with both sides than it is to find blatant partisans. Simple test for this is to ask some one to describe the positions of the other party and why they feel the way they do without using any disparaging or cynical terms. Fun experiment, I invite you to try it.
Your approach sounds like a confrontational approach. In "The culture map" it is described that the US culture is far less confrontational than e.g. France. It might be difficult to engage in a discussion without disclaimers such as "let me play devil's advocate". As in this book is explained, an American was wondering why the French at the dinner table were laughing together after a heated discussion on a topic short before. A discussion is not a personal attack. However, in the US it is quicker felt this way.
Hence, that people are not trapped in filter bubbles should not be countered by an argument based on a personal confrontational approach about how constructively they engage in political discussions.
While social media usage is lower in France[1], it's laughable to say that it's not a force. Nor is agenda & social-media driven journalism less of a thing, it's just mitigated by government fairness doctrines[2] -- but certainly still there.
Hell, you can make a prima facie argument that this is totally true just by looking at the massive riots happening all across France.
> If someone can correctly explain a position but continue to disagree with it, that position is less likely to be correct. And if ability to correctly explain a position leads almost automatically to agreement with it, that position is more likely to be correct.
I'm not sure that has any bearing on whether they are "trapped in a filter bubble". It is quite possible to very deeply understand the motivations and thoughts of a group and still be blatantly disparaging - ask a historian, for instance.
Likewise, it's easy to read strongly liberal/conservative takes on the news without being convinced by them. They are pitched to an audience with very different priors, and often are not even trying to convince anyone else.
Let's say you have a historian who believes that historical group X were terrible human beings. How likely do you suppose that this historian would be open to new information that shed new light on group X, with some positive and possibly redemptive qualities?
I reckon, based on my understanding of human nature, that historian would take a while to come around, if they ever revised their perspective at all.
> Let's say you have a historian who believes that historical group X were terrible human beings. How likely do you suppose that this historian would be open to new information that shed new light on group X, with some positive and possibly redemptive qualities?
Pretty much all historians face that whenever analyzing WWII. Answer is partly in historians not making direct moral judgement in their historical work. The goal is not to decide whether people were "good" or "bad". That is for philosophers and fiction writers.
>How likely do you suppose that this historian would be open to new information...
New "information", yeah, not very likely at all.
New "evidence", very likely indeed.
"Evidence", can be investigated for veracity. Information, is no better than you and I sitting around making up stuff.
I think that's a subtle but important distinction that I think a lot of people don't understand about the work of a historian. You have plenty of people who wrote down a story about Agincourt for instance. Plenty of people will still tell you some story about Agincourt today. But only a very, very, few of those stories are consistent with the evidence. For example:
----
Hmm, there are a shit ton of arrow heads at Agincourt.
Wow! They're all laying in EXACTLY the distribution that long dead historian X indicated given his account of the battle.
Hmm. None of them are where long dead historian Y indicated given her account of the battle.
----
You analyze historical site after historical site, and after a while, you figure out that the accounts of long dead historian X nearly always align closely with the physical historical evidence. So... yeah... naturally after a while, over the hundreds of years that pass, more and more historians start believing long dead historian X rather than long dead historian Y.
I'm not sure that has anything to do with filter bubbles either. In fact, it seems to be an argument that it doesn't matter what kind of news and information gets presented to people, even if everyone gets the same news feed they'll keep their existing opinions.
Use of disparaging terms is arguably caused by the need to belong to local community. That is, if you don't want to be outsider, you have to use "appropriate" language and show "correct" values (on climate change, abortion, etc).
So arguably it is more of a local, group identity effect, like being a fun of a local sports team, than a true bubble / filter effect.
Group identities are the best way to create filter bubbles.
Once you've aligned yourself with a group, you're less likely to be swayed by "outsiders". You'll resist, even if subconsciously, any suggestion which opposes your team's view, because you'll begin to develop an identity around those viewpoints. Few people are well-practiced at challenging their own identities.
Check out this excellent essay by PG, "Keep Your Identity Small", for a better description of this phenomenon: http://paulgraham.com/identity.html
I've always hated shaving. And I also hate trimming beards. When I was working in meatspace, I just kept my head and face at about 3-5 mm. But now, I'm just Mr Natural.
So now, among my friends and their families, I'm just another old hippie. But in conservative areas, I can easily pass as Duck Dynasty :) Especially if I'm wearing my NRA hat ;)
>Simple test for this is to ask some one to describe the positions of the other party and why they feel the way they do without using any disparaging or cynical terms
That doesn't work because liberals are unable to understand and empathize with conservative views. They lack the same fundamental values, and so they are unable to see conservative views as being within a set of values that are different from their own. Instead they see conservative views as being contrary to values, period. Liberals being asked to answer a survey the way they think a conservative would will answer agree/disagree questions like "one of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal" with disagree, but actual conservatives say agree. On the other hand, conservatives are able to accurately answer the same survey as a liberal would. Moderates are able to answer accurately as either a liberal or a conservative.
Both sides do demonize each other, that's not the question. The question is if they understand each other. Abortion is a perfect example. Conservatives understand the liberal position, that a woman's "right" to an abortion is more important than a fetus's "right" to live. Obviously they disagree, and obviously they consider the other view abhorrent. But they understand what that view is.
On other other hand, liberals overwhelmingly do not understand conservative positions. Sticking with the same issue of abortion, most liberals say conservatives oppose abortion because they hate women and want to control their bodies. This despite the fact that the majority of people opposed to abortion are women. They simply believe the reverse of what I stated above: that the fetus's "right" to live is more important than the woman's "right" to have an abortion.
I'm torn on this. The liberal understanding of this is not entirely wrong. The evidence is that if you look at the big pro-life groups, they are not just anti abortion, they are also anti birth control. So it is not entirely irrational for liberals to think the way they do about this. Perhaps the folks who are both pro-life AND pro birth control need to up their game?
edit: I would bet that this is because Roman Catholics provide most of the funding for the big pro-life groups.
>The liberal understanding of this is not entirely wrong
Yes, it is.
>The evidence is that if you look at the big pro-life groups, they are not just anti abortion, they are also anti birth control.
That is incorrect, and a good example of the bubbles being real. You are just looking at church opposition because that's what the media likes to focus on showing. And it would not make the liberal idea of the conservative view correct even if it were true. Christians who oppose birth control do so because they value the traditions of their culture, not because they hate women. Again, most of them are women. And many of the people who are portrayed as "opposing birth control" actually just oppose having their tax money used to pay for other people's birth control, which is not the same thing.
>So it is not entirely irrational for liberals to think the way they do about this.
It isn't irrational. Being wrong is not the same as being irrational.
> It isn't irrational. Being wrong is not the same as being irrational.
Rational: based on or in accordance with reason or logic.
Your argumentative tone is not compelling and you fail to demonstrate your position within some very constrained topics. Perhaps you will reconsider some of these ideas.
Your link does not support your belief that it is in some way partially correct. The catholic church is not a pro-life group. They pre-date the very idea of a pro-life group by many centuries. The largest pro-life group that random person lists does not have a position on birth control. So this does not support the notion that pro-life equals anti-birth control. But again, even if pro-life did equal anti-birth control that would not support the belief that pro-life people are pro-life because they hate women.
In case you missed in the post you are replying to: "And it would not make the liberal idea of the conservative view correct even if it were true. Christians who oppose birth control do so because they value the traditions of their culture, not because they hate women." Even if every single person who opposes abortion also opposed birth control, that would not make the belief that those people oppose abortion because they hate women correct. Opposing birth control is not hating women any more than opposing abortion is. Consider the opposite incorrect belief: "liberals hate babies, that's why they are pro-abortion". Now would you think "liberals also support birth control, so that proves it is because they hate babies" is good support for that belief? Neither supporting abortion nor supporting birth control can be equated to hating babies, just as neither opposing abortion nor opposing birth control can be equated to hating women.
>Rational: based on or in accordance with reason or logic
Yes? The four humors theory of health and medicine was based on reason and logic. It was also wrong. You can have a rational belief based on incomplete or incorrect data.
>Your argumentative tone is not compelling
Please don't assume a "tone" for someone. It does not further discussion.
>Perhaps you will reconsider some of these ideas.
I have. And in light of the lack of contradictory evidence, my views did not change this time.
> Your link does not support your belief that it is in some way partially correct.
Not my belief. I have evidence, so it's what I know, since previously I did not know. I found your arguments compelling and looked it up.
> In case you missed in the post you are replying to:
Nope. You decided to ignore a statement you agreed with for another you wanted to attack.
The largest pro life groups (as a body made up of pie slices) does evidently (ie have evidence) that supports:
> they are not just anti abortion, they are also anti birth control
Which is what was being referenced by at least a partial correctness, since it was a following statement. Not sure who you're trying to fool.
> Yes? The four humors theory of health and medicine was based on reason and logic. It was also wrong
Wrong is a matter of evidence. For the time, it was right as right can be. That's how science works and is in accordance with rationality. Proving a theorem, does not mean that bringing it up as a theorem was/is wrong. Over time, changes in knowledge are part of the process.
Good luck with your religious convictions to these issues.
Then why not present it? Until you establish it is fact, then yes it is your belief.
>You decided to ignore a statement you agreed with for another you wanted to attack.
I have no idea what you mean.
>The largest pro life groups (as a body made up of pie slices) does evidently (ie have evidence) that supports
The link you provided says otherwise. It very clearly shows the largest pro-life group has no position on birth control.
>Which is what was being referenced by at least a partial correctness
That does not make logical sense. The statement "conservatives support abortion because they hate women and want to control their bodies" is not proven to be partially correct even if you believe that all conservatives oppose birth control. Opposing birth control is not hating women.
>For the time, it was right as right can be
No it was not. Incorrect isn't correct if you simply don't know any better.
>Good luck with your religious convictions to these issues.
I find it interesting that you ignore what I say, try to attribute what I say to malice, claim your belief is objective fact, and still suggest that I am the one with religious conviction here. "Conservatives hate women because I say they do" is not fact, no matter how many times you repeat it.
Being against birth control is a very specific thing to the Catholic church. Almost no one else subscribes to that belief, including nearly all religious and non-religious groups in north america.
I couldn't name a pro-life group period. I know a lot of churches are pro-life, but they are not pro-life groups any more than they are anti-theft groups.
> That doesn't work because liberals are unable to understand and empathize with conservative views.
Actually conservatives and liberals do share a lot of values. Let's call this the foundational set V.
Conservatives go on to add additional values to the set V: mostly concerns for purity, respect for authority and a heightened concern for security. Let's call this set A.
Conservatives could then easily predict the answers of liberals because they are both based on V, but it's not symmetrical, because conservatives are working from a bigger set of values V+A.
>Actually conservatives and liberals do share a lot of values
They share two or three values: care and fairness for sure, and maybe liberty (not necessarily a value held by either group, but one held by some subset of both groups). That doesn't contradict my statement that liberals are unable to understand and empathize with conservative views. Views are based on values. Lacking the values that create the view makes it very hard to understand the view.
>Conservatives go on to add additional values to the set V
Precisely, they add loyalty, authority and sanctity. Liberals do not have these values, often even viewing them as evil. And so they do not understand the views based on those values. Conservatives do have the values liberals do, and so they can understand the views based on those values.
Whilst that's one way to phrase it, the underlying differences are deeper and more to do with perception of the span of human nature.
For instance the apparent love of conservatives for 'respect for authority' is not actually respect for authority (why would they be so against big government if that were the case?) nor particular to conservatives, but rather, a preference for systems and formalised power structures over loose, informally specified power structures. One can observe that people with liberal views often have tremendous respect for certain types of unstructured authority, in particular, academics.
The book "A Conflict Of Visions" provides an alternative explanation for this apparent discovery that liberals cannot understand conservatives but not vice-versa. Conservatives see disagreement with their world view as naivety, but liberals see disagreement with their world view as the result of an evil or malign nature. The latter view leads to a belief that attempting to understand such a perspective is itself immoral behaviour, as you might be legitimising it, or alternatively, might be tempted to the dark side by mere exposure to the ideas themselves.
This is why you see so much no-platforming and general censorship coming from people with particular world views: they believe that conservative ideas work like some sort of infectious disease. Conservatives don't think that way about liberal views.
Ok, let me tweak my list of additional conservative values then: heightened concern for purity, intolerance of ambiguity and a heightened concern for security.
NOTE: I am not conservative, so take that for what it's worth.
>For instance the apparent love of conservatives for 'respect for authority' is not actually respect for authority (why would they be so against big government if that were the case?)
Because authority is not the only value they hold, it is just one of six values. Overreaching authority will naturally conflict with those other values, particularly liberty. This is also complicated by the fact that libertarians tend to be lumped into the category of conservatives in the US, when libertarians have little in common with conservatives and overwhelmingly base their moral foundations entirely on liberty. Libertarians don't have respect for authority, conservatives do. But if you call libertarians conservatives, that will make things look weird.
>One can observe that people with liberal views often have tremendous respect for certain types of unstructured authority, in particular, academics.
I can not observe that at all. Quite the contrary, I find overwhelmingly that liberals do not respect authority in any form. Academics are not respected by liberals, they are constantly attacked and vilified for publishing facts that liberals don't like. Liberals will point to an academic that agrees with them to bolster their argument, but they don't actually respect academics, as they have nothing but disdain for an academic that disagrees with them. Look at how James Watson has been treated by liberals, I don't see a lot of respect there. If they had respect for academic authority, they would actually consider what is said, instead of assuming the person saying it is evil and calling them evil.
>The book "A Conflict Of Visions" provides an alternative explanation for this apparent discovery
I'm not sure that's an alternative explanation, it seems like the same explanation. Haidt notes the same thing, that liberals view conservatives as evil because the underlying values conservatives hold are not values to liberals. While conservatives see liberals as ignorant or stupid, because they incorrectly assume liberals are using the same underlying values to come to conclusions about issues and so they must be ignorant of some fact or making an error of reasoning.
It is always strange to me how this happens. You are exactly right in asking how one describes the other party. People are really similar, just with different beliefs.
> We provide a set of results that, given a set of individuals' belief systems, allow a systematic determination of which topics will reach a consensus, and which topics will disagreement in arise.
Every time your parents or grandparents say something insensitive about a group of people, I always think about how it is currently socially acceptable to think of the other party as irreconcilable dangerous mentally unstable people
This kind of thought was acceptable and comforting to your parents about people that now contribute greatly to society
Everyone is doing it across the party line right now and it is ridiculous and they dont know that people in the other party are taking the exact same approach
Almost no party and no issue is based on the exact opposite reasoning for not agreeing
So that means people are a lot more reconcilable than some party line quip would suggest
The moment you framed it as two sides you pushed people toward creating one overreaching characterization for both sides. It is effectively asking for partizan position, because no other is possible.
The other question is, what if the cynical disparaging term is factually correct one for portions of each party?
Well if someone is even able to describe the other side in a nuanced way, breaking down some of the points of view of the various factions that make up each side...I would say they're half way there.
A cynical, disparaging term is opinion, not fact. So you can't be "factually correct" when evaluating someone's opinion.
A lot of disparaging comments express real things. Coward, racist, flip floper, unprincipled. These exists and are also disparaging.
I think that if you start with assumption of two sides and your question forces the person to be in one, then you already stopped being nuanced. Because the other side are those whose views are as far from mine as possible by definition.
I think insults definitely have utility. They're persuasive tools that cut through cruft...but they're also opinions. It's not a "fact" that someone is being cowardly, for example...that's just an observational opinion. From a certain point of view, someone can seem like a coward and from another point of view they can seem heroic. These are perceptual things...so they're not facts.
How is that not a possible fact? And also, if you exclude observational opinions, then it is impossible to full fill your "describe the other side" demand. Because when you ask someone to describe someone else, you are literally asking for a bunch of observational opinions.
Disparaging and insult is not really the same. To go to clear extreme, I can be disparaging of Goring or Himmler without going out of my way of being insulting. Just by telling the truth about what they did, believed and who they were.
What you describe seems to be the default behaviour of humans on the one hand, and the effect of political polarization in the US on the other hand. Neither of those phenomena are necessarily based on filter bubbles.
"Filter Bubbles" are a real phenomenon to be wary of, particularly for something like YouTube that aggressively suggests videos and autoplays by default or Facebook that injects stories into your news feed. I think what the article misses on that front is not that users don't have access to other sources, but they're passively spoon fed stories that reinforce their beliefs.
But I'm not convinced this expands to Search. Search algorithm implementations are enough of a nebulous black box that it makes for a convincing story, and Duck Duck Go has been shamelessly spinning that FUD for advertising, but the claims don't really stand up to scrutiny.
It's somewhat anecdotal but in my experience, Twitter search can be quite filter bubbly.
I've had this recording sitting around in my YouTube account which illustrates an example of this: CES 2015 which was around the time of the shit show known as Gamergate.
The event aside, it was interesting to understand how sides were inflamed based on what they were seeing thanks to Twitter effectively amplifying similar opinions, creating an echo chamber.
On the left is an account that was heavily skewed on purpose, towards the more conservative group while on the right is what a regular, unlogged in user would see.
A regular user would have no idea of such an event going on while the user on the left would think that this event was engulfing the planet based on the sheer amount of noise being generated.
For users on the left, it would be near impossible to penetrate the noise, based on retweets and likes, short of a tweet being passed around for users to jeer at. A literal bubble in that sense.
The sad part is that a great number of people from both sides seemingly had a lot in common without realising it. Unfortunately they had no visibility of the "others" short of going out of their way to meet people and talk with them one on one.
As we all know, it's easier to just label a foreign group and pretend we're objectively right.
Anyway, that's just my experience with filter bubbles anyway. Hopefully you found it interesting.
Your comment put me in mind of the "get Pao out" hate campaign at Reddit a few years back. At its peak, its most incendiary, bile-spewing peak, if you were not looking at the standard "all" front page you would have had no idea it was even happening at all.
With "all" as your default page, it was literally full of it, maybe your top two pages just entirely anti-Pao memes etc.
The difference was so stark it was hard to believe I was even using the same Reddit as these people
I miss most Reddit garbage now that I no longer go to the front page. I mainly stick to a few subreddits now, like r/boardgames, and the moderators actively keep that stuff out since it has nothing to do with the subject. I think I saw a little of the Pao stuff back then, but I think I saw it from other sites, like Kotaku.
> A regular user would have no idea of such an event going on[...]
The account on the right still had several "#GamerGate" tweets, including one from Milo Yiannopoulos who was involved enough to be covered in the Wikipedia article about it[1].
It seemed to me the main difference in the logged-in & logged-out account in that video is that the logged-out one is getting press release content, perhaps the logged-in account wasn't responsive to that according to Twitter's algorithms?
Recently I discovered a 'filter bubble' in search. In an online discussion I mentioned the Peasant's Revolt in passing, which, for me, based in England, results in the events of 1381 when the English king who was all of fourteen years old agreed to meet the rebel leader only to kill him.
What I had not realised is that a search for 'Peasant's Revolt' is different depending on where you live. So in Germany the search will result in a German 'Peasant's Revolt'. As it turns out every country has had some 'Peasant's Revolt' at some stage of history. I have not tested what results you will get if you search for the same 'event' elsewhere, e.g. in Italy, but I wouldn't be surprised if that gave an Italian 'Peasant's Revolt' as the top search result with the events of 1381 in England far, far down the list.
This would be correct behaviour from the search engine but is still a filter bubble. It is okay for us to have different perspectives yet share the same facts and history.
This is just tangential personal reflection but I feel like at every stage in my life I've been in some kind of bubble. Bubbles come and go depending on my environment and life experience. Being situated on a university campus, mostly insulated from the concerns of the real world and free to exercise the curiosities of youth -- that was probably my first big bubble. I had no access to or understanding of the concerns of most people working to make a living or raising families. Similarly I can think of periods of time when I was in a bad relationship, or stuck at a menial job. My day-to-day experience constitutes a filter bubble, and I don't even think it's good or bad. I feel like the media bubbles under discussion are symptomatic of a larger cultural malady in which our experience, our own personal bubbles, are so confused and impoverished that we jump at any screen or soundbite just to have some medium through which to experience anything.
I wonder if anyone is banking on a reversal of that perception of "filter bubbles"?
It seems to me that creating "filter bubbles" not only should be the goal of social networks, but that it's a desirable goal.
Obviously, someone will have to come up with better branding to wash off the stink from that term, but the underlying concept is what people fundamentally want, and it's here to stay.
Facebook recently changed their vision statement to talk about making communities more tightly-knit, and so on. This can only be done by curating content and limiting information to stuff that attracts people together and makes them feel at home.
People have limited time and attention. Dunbar's number imposes constraints on how much data/people they can keep up with. And people want that circle to be as pleasant an experience as possible.
I'll be the first to make that bet if no one else has: the social network that will displace Facebook will displace it because it will embrace filter bubbles, not "solve" them as if they were a problem.
If you show people things from other tribes, the reasonable stuff the other tribe has to say gets buried under the epic war both sides are thrust into as soon as anyone says anything recursively controversial.
The problem we have now is that existing networks profit from showing you only that portion of what the other tribe has to say, because it's what increases "engagement" (i.e. time spent fighting/arguing on the internet).
What would be desirable would be to do the exact opposite -- bury the toxoplasma but still show the material from other tribes that isn't virally outrage-generating.
That may not maximize number of hours spent per user, but if people like it more, it could maximize total number of users, which is how you build network effects -- and that's the hardest thing for a new network to do.
It would also presumably benefit things like mutual understanding, unity and general happiness.
The distinction with archipelagos is that you have to be able to choose between them, at which point you're now talking about communities rather than filter bubbles. And communities are good, but in this context they're fractional. A community for talking about software development is useful, but those people are eligible to go to the polls on election day and still need somewhere to learn about immigration and criminal justice reform and taxes. Ideally from more than one side.
I don't really disagree with any of that and I'm not sure how that's a rebuttal.
I think they can be complementary. "Filter bubbles" work as the discovery part that guides you toward the best communities (from your POV) and also gives directional information about their boundaries.
If people are interested in learning about immigration and criminal justice reform and taxes, those topics will be amply covered in the community formed around their "filter bubble."
If your point is that everyone should be interested in those topics, I think you're making a different point that is much harder to argue.
Sure. And there's a bunch of content that leans in every political direction and that presents reality through a distorting lens. I don't find that particularly scary or dangerous, because it's always been the case.
I think that a change of degree has turned out to be a change in kind here. Ad supported media on the Internet maximize ad views by maximizing outrage. It has become a vicious cycle driven by money. This was not the case a generation ago.
I'm sure this was not a conscious decision by Google, Facebook or Twitter, but that's the way it is.
An anecdote: When Bush Sr. died, I saw ~30 different comments and tweets about how sick they were of the constant barrage of praise for whom they surmised to be a war criminal, and yet I did not see one single bit of positive words spoken about him. It was splash of cold water awakening me to the depth of my filter bubble.
In the Google+ RPG community, every once in a while I see people complain about asshats, attacks, harassment, etc. I rarely see the original behaviour that people complain about.
I tend to see that as a sign that I've trimmed my circles well.
Part of the problem here is of course the tendency of people to be assholes to people they tend to see as THEM, as the people who are causing whatever they believe is a problem. Most people don't like being exposed to abuse, so we close ourselves off from it, creating a safe space for ourselves, but also a filter bubble.
Filter bubbles would be less of a problem if we could be nicer to each other, but that seems unlikely in an age of polarisation, vilification, paranoia, and a US president who has turned insults and mockery into the new standard.
My parents are completely in a Fox News bubble and so are lots of other people unfortunately. It changed their views completely. Prior to Fox News they were reasonable humans that saw things in a rounded way and that eroded upon repeated exposure to it. I wish they had never gotten cable.
I have two sets of grandparents, one is constantly angry and watching Fox News, and the others are angry and watching CNN. Neither will accept any sort of news story from a source that’s not “unbiased”, which means seems to mean supports their side. It’s really frustrating.
Maybe they can duke it out and come to a conclusion.
I find watching biased news from both sides gives me more info than “moderate” lukewarm reporting. Biased sources tend to make stronger arguments for their narratives and omit less “inconvenient” details of the other side.
Also a good way to approach any world conflict or propaganda.
> I find watching biased news from both sides gives me more info than “moderate” lukewarm reporting. Biased sources tend to make stronger arguments for their narratives and omit less “inconvenient” details of the other side.
Different parties are right about different things.
For example, Trump is unfairly maligned on trade. The tariffs on China are extremely modest -- we tax domestic producers more than that on net. And something has to compensate for China purposely tilting the playing field a hundred different ways. But if you look at left of center media you'd think the tariffs were destroying the economy, with no data but plenty of anecdotes from companies whinging about having to pay a little more for goods from sweatshops in China.
On the other hand, Trump's position on coal is completely indefensible.
Which implies "moderate" isn't a real thing. Saying he's half right on trade and half right on coal isn't moderation, it's gibberish. He's mostly right on trade and entirely wrong on coal. Sawing the baby in half every time is no better than uncritically believing one side over the other.
The trouble is the mainstream sources, especially on cable, are still terrible -- even the ones with an obvious affiliation frequently don't present the best argument for their positions because their goal is to lather up the base and generate ratings rather than actually inform anyone.
And both sides ignore anything that isn't politically expedient. They never really go after the banks, the insurance companies, government contractors or employees -- or if they do it's a populist call to riot rather than any kind of principled proposal to make specific changes.
The best thing to do is to rely on domain experts and primary sources, which are much easier to access now that most everything is on the internet, but it's still more time consuming than most people are going to be able to commit to. Which is maybe why everything is such a mess.
It seems like we need journalists with an opinion but not a party.
Well, that depends: what you see as left of center media might actually be rather centrist along some axes. To be frothing at the mouth in rage at tariffs identifies you as a globalist thinker of some 'neo' persuasion: neocon, or neoliberal. Either way, though you may disagree sharply on social issues you've got a shared committment to frictionless commerce over national boundaries in the belief that this will cause all the world to prosper (by all the world, you might mean 'the richest individuals and companies in any given country')
So, if that's your agenda, you (a) will hate tariffs whether they're proposed by Trump or a socialist like Bernie Sanders, and (b) you'll see to it that things are framed with the perspective that NO PERSON could possibly doubt the evilness of tariffs and the benevolence of maximally frictionless global trade.
You might even insist that nobody is actually trapped in a filter bubble about it, as there is no possibility that anyone can have an intelligent thought that DOESN'T embrace ultimately free trade. This position automatically forbids thinking about externalities or epiphenomena that arise from this embracing of trade across the widest possible market.
Hell, even the idea of 'market' is a filter bubble. Certainly the phrase 'Trump is unfairly maligned' used for any reason, is a filter bubble. I myself have to resist the tendency to react negatively just because of the association with the man, and would instead say: nah, he is fairly maligned because he's not approaching an 'anti-globalist' position for any constructive reason. In no way is he addressing the underlying mechanisms of the problem, he's just throwing sand in the gears. If it's a mechanism causing catastrophic damage, that alone might seem good, but we're gonna need better answers than just breaking stuff.
I would prefer to see something like unionization or communism break the ability to conduct labor arbitrage (not as an ultimate final goal, but as a counter-force to capital's ability to have things all its own way), but I do not think that's what Trump is up to. If he was, I'd say he was unfairly maligned too. Since he's not, I consider him fairly maligned .
> I would prefer to see something like unionization or communism break the ability to conduct labor arbitrage (not as an ultimate final goal, but as a counter-force to capital's ability to have things all its own way), but I do not think that's what Trump is up to. If he was, I'd say he was unfairly maligned too. Since he's not, I consider him fairly maligned .
You seem to be saying that Trump has an anti-globalist position, which is reasonable for a number of reasons, but he should still be maligned because he is not a communist. Is that actually what you're saying, or am I misreading it?
I don't want to sound like I'm defending Fox News (I'm not), but this is a cable news problem in general. Making every story somehow an outrage is how they get ratings. Whether CNN is following Stormy Daniels from strip club to strip club, or MSNBC is yelling about some random comment it's much of the same thing.
There just isn't enough news to fill 24 hours of content every single day across multiple stations.
I wonder, were there ever a neutral state-owned news media in US that provided sensible news without much of the agitating fear-mongering that seems so prevalent? In many EU countries, Finland for example, there is a state-owned media organization (YLE) which main purpose is to provide unbiased and high-quality news reporting to all Finnish citizens.
It's not without its faults, but in general you can expect YLE to provide quality content that wouldn't be possible if its monetary value was the only concern. Also I like that there's no ads in YLEs programs. And you can watch most of them free on internet.
The US does have a television network called PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) which is a non-profit organization although it is only partially government funded (they generally ask for donations from viewers about once a year). The quality of the reporting is usually pretty good, but news is only a subset of their programming, so it doesn't compare to something like the 24-hour cable news channels.
I am not sure what I did with my filter bubble. Did I make it stronger or weaker, larger or smaller?
The polarisation on twitter and Facebook after Brexit and the two years before and after the US election saw the losing tribe write off the other half as evil, selfish, needing to be re-educated, that democracy was over and a strong left hand was needed and that the free press needed regulation.
These were views by some of you, CTO level educated SV technologists.
I pointed out that the opposition wasn't evil, democracy was still valid, and mainly i pointed out how they were blinkered. Some people took it personally. Now they are not in my filter bubble. Worth saying that the winning tribalism was not in my filter bubble at any point.
My bubble has less tribalism than before but it's also less large.
This is a pretty pointless and contentless article.
As others have pointed out, it's attacking a strawman, so the point isn't even relevant. But even if it were, what's the conclusion? There's a graph of people's trust in media, and some quotes from DDG's marketing—neither of which seem relevant to the central point.
> are filter bubbles really the problem here? Danny Sullivan [...] argues fairly persuasively that they’re not because even DuckDuckGo users see different results.
What is this sentence? Argues conclusively what? If anything, it supports the thesis that they exist (by this article's awkward definition), since they also pervade even DDG.
In my experience the same people that complain about filter bubbles also want offensive content gone. It seems the underlying motivation is just "show more of my beliefs less of theirs".
In my experience there are some good tests for this on various noteworthy political events in recent times.
For example if you think that President Trump gave a press conference in which he referred to neo Nazis as very fine people, you are in a bubble because the context and quote are the exact opposite which he later clarifies when asked by the reporter, saying "I'm not talking about the Neo Nazis".
If you believe that Hillary Clinton sold 20% of the USA's uranium to Russia in exchange for donations then you are in a bubble because that characterization is missing several key pieces of information.
People treat future events based on what they have preconceived in these erroneous ways. The media distorts something with a tiny grain of truth into a narrative, and that narrative is what remains as a criteria for filtering future information.
When you interact with ideologically entrenched folks, you can easily poke holes using examples like this. If they are reasonable they will recognize what has happened to them. If not reasonable, there will be cognitive dissonance and excuses as to why their belief is still right. The latter are not worth engaging with further because it's an uphill battle that will likely yield no progress.
Media organizations like CNN and Fox News have become brazen in this regard. Recently CNN had a participant on a panel masquerading as a Trump voter, who was revealed to have a YouTube channel that espoused the exact opposite view. On a similar panel, key parts of answers on voter fraud were edited out of the final broadcast to make the respondent look uninformed, when they had, in fact, answered the question citing sources and narrating a great deal of information.
Market forces have moved the keepers of the "Gated institutional narrative" further towards the new clickbait, ideological, tabloid brand of journalism, and we are all worse off for it.
Just because people may visit other news sources, they can still be in a Facebook filter bubble where everyone in their newsfeed thinks just like them.
At least, that's how my facebook newsfeed looks, most of my Facebook friends/family have similar political views as me, so my news feed is full of stories and comments backing up my own political views. So even if I read opposing viewpoints in other news sites, my newsfeed still reinforces that those opposing viewpoints are invalid, and it makes it seem like everyone agrees with me.
The author seems to miss the point of filter bubbles.
There's a known cognitive bias where people tend to seek out information that mainly validates their existing views. Filter bubbles become a major enabler of that, allowing them to develop horse blinders to reality. Filter bubbles can lead people down into more extremist views that don't mesh with reality, rather than giving them exposure to counterarguments and allowing them to develop a more well-rounded view.
I wonder how one would go about actually quantifying any of this?
The article tries to use two different studies to do this, but this approach seems flawed for the very simple reason that participants are not the same across both studies.
Imho this whole problem is very comparable to being biased in general. We are all biased in some way or another and I like to think most of us are aware of this reality.
But being aware of it does not simply translate to being aware of the full extent of the biases or lead to an outcome where the bias is "negated", if it is as easy as that, then barely anybody should be biased.
In a way, it's like trying to define what goes on inside a blind spot, which by definition, is kinda impossible: If you'd be aware of your blind spot, it wouldn't be a blind spot anymore.
I see the same problem with "filter bubbles", which in a way are just systemic biases very comparable how different social circles have different Overton windows. Most of these seem not to be forced upon people but are rather consequences of choices made based on personal biases/the Overton window often heavily influenced by in ones peer groups.
While one might be aware of these choices, and how one reasoned them, that does not entail knowledge about the reality of other, maybe equally valid, choices. In that context, a lot of this feels more like a philosophical problem than an actual social one. People will, for the most part, rationalize their own choices as the "most valid ones".
If they wouldn't, then they wouldn't have made those choices because only very few people make irrational choices on purpose for the sake of acting irrational.
>> “The article tries to use two different studies to do this, but this approach seems flawed for the very simple reason that participants are not the same across both studies.”
That’s not a valid requirement.
In fact using the same participants in multiple studies biases the results.
> Few people are in complete filter bubbles in which they only consume, say, Fox News
Sure, if you only want to count "complete" filter bubbles in which 100% of your search results come from a single source.
Averaged over millions of people and billions of searches, however, even a 10% bias is likely to have a measurable effect.
People don't get pushed over to one side of a partisan issue overnight. Like a pollutant in your drinking water, it takes a long time of constant exposure to unbalanced news for the subtle biases to seep into your brain and change how you see the world.
Also one would assume that placing you 100% in one "bubble" would be bad for business. Sites wants to see if you need/can be pushed into yet unknown areas of interest.
But sure, no one is actually trapped in a filter bubble. If you're aware that you're in a bubble, then it because much easier to escape. The problem is that most people aren't aware that they aren't seen all sides of an issue.
>We’re not trapped in filter bubbles, but we like to act as if we are. Few people are in complete filter bubbles in which they only consume, say, Fox News, Matt Grossmann writes in a new report for Knight
That's irrelevant. It's enough that their biases are regularly reinforced by the sources they follow (something modern social media and news aggregators make extremely easy), they don't have to "only consume" their side of the story.
Regarding the point about filter bubbling in DuckDuckGo: My guess would be that it's not a trivial problem for them to undo the filter bubbling that their search providers are doing. But, I think if three people were to hit the "refresh" button 10 times on the same query, then the variation seen by one single person is probably similar to the variation seen across different people running the same query.
Perhaps not entirely, but do filter bubbles become an issue when an individual is isolated in the same community for most of their life? I've slowly traveled outwards from my hometown of 2000~ people to now living in a city of 300k+, I've been to a few places between then and now but while my internet bubble has always been there, it hasn't consumed me.
This article doesn't really have a lot of meat to it.
Despite that, I am very skeptical of the filter bubble idea and especially as it relates to customized internet search results. I found Eli Pariser's book to be very unconvincing. It is full of qualifiers like "might," "could," and "may" and few hard facts.
To a degree we have always been in some kind of bubble because we aren't omniscient. Before electronic media, our knowledge of things outside our immediate circle was very limited. Was that a filter bubble? During the heyday of newspapers when a city had multiple newspapers there would be explicitly liberal and conservative newspapers (growing up my hometown newspaper was the Republican!)
I feel like now I know a lot more about people who disagree with me than I ever did. I may not understand them but I know that Trump supporters, flat earthers, creationists, anti-vaxers, and people who care about sports all exist.
The idea that people who report being intensely allied to particular political parties would automatically be the people who we should be most concerned about being in filter bubbles is bizarre, and is part of a broader media narrative that all opinions right or left of the NYT and WaPo editorial pages are the result of manipulation. This seems like one of a cluster of centrist articles attempting to debunk this idea, specifically targeted at Republican bleating about tech-media companies hiding left-wing bias behind claims that they have objective algorithms that have no particular political content.
They're twisting the finding, culled from mashing together a number of studies (not any particular study) and summarized in a whitepaper, that find when you monitor the people who self-report the most partisan consumption of news, it turns out that they actually read a lot of different sources. In other words, they've discovered that the most angry readers of news spend as much time hate-reading as reading outlets that they agree with.
Interesting finding by itself. Instead of reporting that, though, they transform the group that most self-reports being in what the authors would call a filter bubble (i.e. they report only watching Maddow or only watching Fox) into the group most likely in a filter bubble, they find that group to not be in a filter bubble, then they declare the non-existence of filter bubbles. It's really garbled logic.
I'd submit that the people most likely to be affected by a filter bubble would be the people who read political news the least, and where the few examples of what they look up would create a skewed algorithmic perception of their interests. I'd further submit that those people would far outnumber the extreme party partisans, but their votes would count equally, so the fact that extreme partisans who are already absolutely sure how they will vote are not trapped in filter bubbles is of far less importance than the people who are not sure about how they will vote, and are affected by new information.
To be frank it seems like old media is increasingly wearing its envy on their sleeve relatively recently. They tried ignoring them at first. then they tried integrating where after ignoring everything on the internet suddenly leaping onto twitter. Then when that doesn't work they started getting angry and trying to make tech the new villain for everything. Like claiming that outright fabricated news for an agenda started with them - no just look at Hearst for one.
There is the incredibly obvious 'tech-lash' astroturfed push and trying to invoke antitrust - all while dutifully ignoring the actual monopolies and media conglomeration. And the Sinclair 'hive-mind' dystopian propaganda pushing that received far less attention than Facebook selling ads.
Beyond the filter bubble, I've noticed that a lot media spends most of their time in personal attacks, and very little time discussing the substance of any issue. Even when the discussion actually contains any substance, authors cannot refrain from poisoning the well. It isn't Person A believes ..., and Person B points to research ..., it is Left-wing ideologue idiot Person A believes crazy idea ...and well-respected patriot Person B point to research ... Both left and right partisan authors are using this style.
I raise this point in a discussion about filter bubbles since I'm suspect the two aspects are self-reinforcing.
There's an interesting phenomenon here in the UK where a lot of the quality journalism on the right is behind a paywall, whereas a lot of the quality journalism on the left is ad-funded and freely available. I can see that being a potential amplifier of 'filter bubbles'.
Are your "Rights" and "Lefts" the same as ours in the US? I think it can all vary, but it would provide interesting context. Is the UK's right more closely aligned with the House of Lords or the like?
They’re fairly similar - though the whole political spectrum is shifted to the left.
The British Conservative Party is pro free market and low tax but socially liberal, with an Atlanticist foreign policy, and is in favor of single payer health care.
The Labour Party is pro government intervention, state planning and redistributive taxes, less sceptical about regulation and has greater historic ties with Europe than with the US. It’s long described itself as a socialist party.
The House of Lords is said to be a house of experts who have been chosen because of their specialist knowledge. Because it is unelected and made up of political appointees, it’s composition can change over time.
There are however limits to what the Lords can actually do to block legislation, so it differs from the Senate. Bills can only be proposed in the House of Commons (so not like the US where either house can propose).
People have _always_ been in self-created filter bubbles - its called Confirmation Bias.
The concern with Google and Facebook and YouTube is that they are now re-inforcing that confirmation bias even more.
NiemanLab cite a few studies here but them seem to be focusing on Google Search Results whereas things like Facebook Walls and the way YouTube recommends 'extreme' points of view on any given topic are also of concern.
Essentially a huge part of the internet is now optimising for clicks, which means targeted clickbait and sensationalism will always crowd out reasoned argument.