The Rise of Filter Bubbles 408
eldavojohn writes "Eli Pariser gave a talk at TED which posits that tailoring algorithms are creating 'filter bubbles' around each user, restricting the information that reaches you to be — unsurprisingly — only what you want to see. While you might be happy that your preferred liberal or conservative news hits you, you'll never get to see the converse. This is because Google, Facebook, newspaper sites and even Netflix filter what hits you before you get to see it. And since they give you what you want, you never see the opposing viewpoints or step outside your comfort zone. It amounts to a claim of censorship through personalization, and now that every site does it, it's becoming a problem. Pariser calls for all sites implementing these algorithms to embed in the algorithms 'some sense of public life' and also have transparency so you can understand why your Google search might look different than someone with opposing tastes."
Hit the link below to watch a video of Pariser's talk.
Re:Derhythmed (Score:5, Interesting)
it's no major feat to allow users to disable some of the non-spam related algorithms.
It would be a major feat, however, to get users to actually exercise that option. Most of Google's users are clueless about these things, and so demanding that they opt-out is the wrong approach; rather, they should opt-in if they want their results filtered in that manner (not that someone who is educated enough to know about such options is likely to be someone who wants to close themselves off to other points of view).
Re:Derhythmed (Score:5, Interesting)
These two systems revolve around how badly people want their mirrors.
Re:Definitely a serious problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Also seems like it's become impolite to disagree with people in your bubble. It's OK to agree, but if you disagree, you're supposed to remain silent. Same effect, but with the added bonus of breeding apathy.
Why Not? (Score:3, Interesting)
They talk about this like it's a bad thing, but why would I, as a member of $Ideology_1 want to waste my time listening to the lies of $Ideology2..N?
Confirmation bias, confirmation bias everywhere (Score:5, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization#The_Internet [wikipedia.org]
We though greater connectivity would broaden our horizons, but it has only made us more narrow minded. And we have only ourselves to blame. I feel the way to combat this is to go outside (gasp) and meet/befriend local people of various backgrounds, and to seek to empathize more and to judge less. I know being judgmental is a rather common bad habit for for self-professed "nerds", and one that's hard to walk away from, but dammit please just try. Society has been going down this slippery slope for quite some time now and it will get worse the more we let the current carry us.
That's what Pariser described (Score:5, Interesting)
Would it exacerbate the problem, or merely hide it? Discarding information that contradicts currently held beliefs is natural enough that most people aren't aware of it, even without personalized search algorithms. I think the bigger issue is the ready availability of like-minded communities that will reinforce your beliefes, no matter how outrageous and outlandish they are.
In his presentation he gave an interesting example. He says he leans liberal, but has conservative friends in facebook, because he's interested in their viewpoint. Then he started noticing that he stopped seeing news links from his conservative friends because the facebook algorithm noticed he didn't click on them. Basically, despite saying that he's interested in the opposing viewpoint, he actually isn't, and was filtering the information himself. The algorithm merely made it transparent and more convenient. Nothing actually changed about the information he was consuming.
It is a problem that people tend to ignore information when it goes against their preconceived notions, but it's not a problem that technology does what we want it to do. If a website kept bombarding me with stories that I didn't want to see, I'd stop visiting it, I wouldn't suddenly start reading those stories.
On second thought, I'm reminded of every April 1st on slashdot, and how every story is bombarded by comments from idiots saying how much they hate slashdot on April Fools' day, and yet they don't seem to leave even for that one day. They keep reading every story and then talking about how much they hate it. Maybe you can make people read what they don't want to read after all...
Self-filter Bubble (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the nice things about slashdot is actually the fact that the readers are not segregated politically.
True, but the more important thing, I think, is that over the years I have often (but not always) discovered that opposing ideas I find on Slashdot have some merit behind them. Hence when someone says something I think it wrong I will often trust it enough to check into it a little and see whether I need to re-evaluate my position. This is why I like Slashdot.
However when reading some random website and encountering something contradictory I am far more likely to assume that the author was some random idiot that doesn't understand what they are talking about than I am to re-evaluate my position simply because experience has shown that this is the most probable case. Hence I would argue that the biggest problem is not so much a "filter bubble" but more that when you hear a dissenting voice you are unlikely to believe it because you do not trust it to be right...although I suppose you could call that a self-filter bubble.
The thinking man... (Score:5, Interesting)
The human animal is designed to filter information. You have billions of nerve endings pouring information into your brain, and it does a brilliant job of consolidating that information into a general perception of physical reality which is still further pared down by attention, belief, expectation, focus, and emotional state. At any given moment you are present to some infinitesimal amount of truth limited by time, space, and your state of mind. To presume that any point of view has more that a circumstantial amount of real truth in it is hubris on the verge of egomania. Plato's Cave should be taught to kindergarteners, and the lesson reinforced at every grade until achieving one's doctoral degree.
Perhaps then, we might finally put an end to people who so committedly believe their own point of view and further feel obligated to shove that belief down the throats of others. That goes for positions on the left, right, and stranger points not on the standard plane of sociopolitics.
A wise soul would surround him/herself with people from many walks and perspectives. Read writing from desperate perspectives. Take everything with a grain of salt. Bring rigorous logic, critical thought and honest skepticism to everything one hears, sees and reads. It takes genuine rigor to manage a healthy intellectual diet. Even more these days when most of the common forms of information and media have fallen into the hands to the same Plutocrats and Corporate Thugs who've worked so diligently to hijack our government. Disagreement is healthy. So is debate. Its only through the process of ideas and perspectives banging up against one another and subjecting our ideas to broad inquiry that any meaningful truth may be discovered.
If you live in a filter bubble, you poison yourself with intellectual monoculture. Monoculture is inherently unstable, unsustainable and doomed to collapse. Challenge yourself, assume you are mistaken, and look for evidence to prove it. You will find it. There is always evidence to support antithesis. When you can own that there are countless sides to any argument, you can actually begin to pursue the truth as is it, not just an intellectual self justification. The truth is hardly ever, easy, simple or exactly what you expect or believe. Its only advantage is that it is in fact the truth. Pursuing truth demands courage and dedication, perhaps that's why there are so few people who've dedicated themselves to finding truth, and why they're so revered.
Re:The thinking man... (Score:4, Interesting)
A reader of Less Wrong by any chance? If not I recommend you look into it.
I agree with your points as a philosophical ideal but I just don't think they'd ever work for more than a niche number of people.
Plato's Cave should be taught to kindergarteners, and the lesson reinforced at every grade until achieving one's doctoral degree.
And most people wouldn't comprehend it or they'd draw the wrong conclusion from it. Remember, half of the world has an IQ under 100. I suspect many other are simply not wired for properly comprehending it although I can't be certain (if religion is due to genetics for example *shrug*). And blind belief is reassuring, we do not wish to be wrong and not seeing the counter-argument achieves that. As you said it requires rigor and, frankly, just look at the average American.
Monoculture is inherently unstable, unsustainable and doomed to collapse.
But until it does it will overcome and consume anything in it's way. Not always but often enough especially if it's not against another monoculture. That is the power of blind belief. It doesn't pause or stop or redirect or reconsider. Eventually it will die but the alternatives won't be around to see it.
Re:I'm bombarded.... (Score:5, Interesting)
A couple of points:
1) You can't really group "Europe" together like that. Sure, in countries such as Germany, Italy and The Netherlands you see parties which are closer to their idiologic roots than in the US. But in the UK that's not the case: there are but two real parties (the liberals have in the last year proven themselves pointless), and they're fairly similar policy wise.
2) A lot of Western Europe (Germany, Italy, Netherlands etc) have many differing political parties getting together to form coalition governments. This is why you see media targeting specific niches. Here in Netherlands we've got free-market, socialist, communist, pseudo-fascist, green & animal parties.
3) "Europe" (the EU) is similar in size to "America". If we compare them politically at that level (i.e. EU vs US) then they're not really that different. Except the average European has less of a say in who, exactly gets to represent them, and the EU has a lot less power over the member countries than Washington does over the States.
Re:I'm bombarded.... (Score:4, Interesting)
What nutty group on the left is controlling the conversation? Seriously. Who?
Have not noticed how far to the kooky right the "center" of contemporary political discourse has come? Even a recent Pew Research poll [people-press.org] (click: "politics and elections," then "support for compromise") showed that 70% of "solid liberals" (supposedly the leftmost group) wanted to compromise with those they disagreed with, while 79% of "staunch conservatives" (the rightmost group) wanted to "stick to their positions." You can see the political ratchet right there.
Re:Definitely a serious problem (Score:5, Interesting)
"One of the nice things about slashdot is actually the fact that the readers are not segregated politically."
Yes slashdot is segregated politically at least when it comes to mods. Most of them have american viewpoints (i.e. pro capitalist, pro free market, pro libertarian, anti-left). Slashdot is heavily weighted towards americanized views of things.
Re:I'm bombarded.... (Score:0, Interesting)
Fortunately, I have discovered a reliable filter to identify nutters. Present raw data and see how people react. If the person gets angry, it says volumes about the person and their agenda. Raw data has no agenda. A person who has a non-linear, non-thoughtful response to raw data should be avoided like toxic waste.
Steven Colbert summed it up nicely: "Reality has a well-known Liberal bias."
I'm pretty convinced that because you want rational discussion, this puts you squarely in the left wing, not in some mythical unbiased center.
Let's look at the right wing. Consider that religious people are taught to believe in X, and only in X, with rational discourse or even discussing the questioning of X being the tool of evil. They can't rationally discuss political topics in a logical manner, because they're trained to ignore or rationalize away evidence that collides with their faith.
(And this doesn't just apply to "fundamentalists" - even moderately religious people will politely brush aside a topic that conflicts with their belief structure. Discussions that can productively cause someone to change their mind don't happen with religious people - they raise an internal wall, and it's over before it starts. They may not react like nutters, but if you cannot change their minds simply by providing factual evidence, they're equally irrational. Polite, but irrational.)
I'm not saying this in an attempt to attack religious people. I'm pointing this out because once you understand their foundations are based on irrational behavior, you realize that a statistically large enough percentage of them can be easily manipulated and exploited, simply by aligning yourself with them.
This unwavering belief system is a powerful tool in the hands of an ultra-rich minority who is unscrupulous enough to abuse it to their own ends. Let's say you're a billionaire who owns a news network, oil company, pharmaceutical firm, or defense manufacturing plant, and you don't want to pay taxes, you want to sell oil, you want to cut regulations, or you want to sell munitions. You pay your minions handsomely to align with these faith-based people. You have them wrap themselves in the flag and tell people about the evils of death taxes and death panels and Canadian pharmacists and Obamacare and terrorists, you have them publicly cry when wounded soldiers come home, and you make sure they blame everything that's wrong on taxes and Liberals and regulations. You encourage them to rally around their religious symbols, and you tell them that they're "threatened" by whatever evils they can dredge up from their holy books: homosexuals, adulterers, people with different religions that make them wear funny hats, whatever gets them to share the same side as your people who are relentlessly focused on cutting the taxes to the wealthy. Or to keep burning oil. Or to end regulatory oversight. Or to keep fighting wars. A billion dollar investment in a news network can pay off hundreds of billions of dollars in profits due to tax evasions, the end of subsidies to competing alternative fuels, pills rushed to market without study or oversight, or war profiteering.
Given changing evidence, the left wingers will change their minds three times before a conversation is over. Since we've already established the religious people will never change their minds, the right-wing politicians have figured out they can use this to their advantage; thus changing your mind, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, is derided as "flip-flopping".
So is this a left-wing nutter screed, is it a valid observation, or is it both?
Re:Derhythmed (Score:4, Interesting)
While I agree that this sort of pre-filtered information over a societal level can become a problem, it's simply not the search engine's job to try to make us better rounded individuals. In fact it is against their interests.
Their job to return the results a user is most likely to be interested in, and whether we want to admit it or not that includes taking whatever biases into account that they can muster. That doesn't mean filtering the results, but it should definitely be a part of the weighting. If Google did not do this, they are likely to actually lose money. Users are not getting the links they want most near the top of their results, therefore it's "working poorly" and any search engine that gives them what they want is a better algorithm, meaning they take their searches and the advertising dollars that go with them to someplace else. I'm not sure "we have half the users we did before, but they all read from a diverse set of sources!" is something to brag about. (Nor does not factoring bias into the weighting necessarily mean that they're going to read a diverse set of sources. Maybe they're just patient in clicking through to find what they're looking for.)
It kind of reminds me of college. "You're treated like an adult! Everything is different!" That's what I heard going in, and I got there and was enraged to find out that I was going to spend two years dealing with "general education" requirements that have nothing to do with the things I want to learn. I spent the last 18 years of my life having people try to make me a well-rounded person. I'm an adult now, paying thousands of dollars a year in tuition. May I fucking choose what I see now? But that was years ago and I digress.
The point is, search engines aren't about rounding our lives or our political influences. It's about returning the best possible results for my search as near to the top of the results list as possible. If I think Fox News is nothing but a bunch of idiotic, anti-intellectual, hypocritical shills and don't place any value in their results, then returning them at the top is a horrendous waste of my time.
We should expose ourselves to a large variety of sources and influences, but it has to be by choice. I don't want anybody forcing it on me or deciding what those sources are.
Re:Definitely a serious problem (Score:2, Interesting)
This is only true in certain bubbles. I'm going to show my own bias here by noting that this problem is rampant in conservative circles where the polite thing to do is to nod your head when people say ridiculous things like "Obama hates white people" or "Obama is trying to destroy the country" or "Everyone thought Saddam had WMD". Most people are smart enough not to believe these things, but they nod anyway. It didn't used to be that way, but it's gotten pretty bad. I blame the rise of the mega churches run by sociopaths who actually teach that it's wrong to question certain notions and who'll tell you where you have to stand politically to be a good Christian.
Re:I'm bombarded.... (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm bombarded with the opposing view constantly. Because most all of the media is biased towards the Left in this country, and any attempt to represent the majority opinions (Conservatives - just check the Battleground Poll, question D3) is met with howls of protest and ad hominem attack.
I have to actively seek news and information that represents my views because none of the major services ever send it to me.
This article is mostly disinformation.
From an S. American and European point of view, your left wing media is the extreme right and your right wing media is also the extreme right. The difference between left and right in USA is so small that nobody outside USA understand what the fuzz is about (unless, of course, when some political group for some mysterious reasons hate immigrants or some ethnic groups, but the only mayor ideological difference between those political US fractions is what ethnicities they favour). If you want a broader view and less bias in media, I recommend you to follow European and S. American news media, not only would you get opinions just slightly right to what is common in US media (what you call the extreme right, not only libertarians but even nazis and fascists), you will also get those "leftist" opinions that is the majority view (the political centre view) of the rest of the Democratic world and that is never, ever reported in US media.
Of course, that would require you to overcome the most effective filter bubble, the language barriers. Even though all Germanic and Latin languages are very similar to English (most of them contain a subset that cover most of the English language), English speakers seem to have extreme difficulties in understanding, or learning to understand, them. But on the other hand, listeners to English that don't have English as a first language, usually understand English better then a listener that have English as a first language, but come form an other part of the world then the one speaking. The different parts of the English speaking world don't seem to communicate much and most English speakers have never communicated with other English speakers outside their small geographic/cultural bubble and have never learned to assimilate even small differences in language.