Eli Pariser – Beware online “filter bubbles” – TED
As web companies strive to tailor their services to our personal tastes, there’s a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a “filter bubble” and don’t get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview.
It’s been hard to make a living as a journalist in the 21st century, but it’s gotten easier over the last few years, as we’ve settled on the world’s newest and most lucrative business model: invasive surveillance. News site webpages track you on behalf of dozens of companies: ad firms, social media services, data resellers, analytics firms — we use, and are used by, them all.
For years, as a regular writer at Wired, I watched this system grow up with unease. I watched more companies put tracking cookies and scripts in every article I wrote. As my career went on, that list kept getting longer. Unlike most of the people I worked with at Wired, I understood the implications of what we were doing. Most journalists have no idea how extensive the system their readers are sold into is, but I have no such excuse. Long before I was a journalist, at the very dawn of the era of the web, I worked in database marketing — what’s more commonly called analytics now.
I got into it from the internet side, but for marketers who built databases of consumer information, the web was love at first sight. The introduction of the browser cookie was a transcendent moment in data collection. It was like the first time a kid at Hogwarts used their wand. You knew it was big, but how big? All you could say is “This will be bigger than I can imagine now.” — and that’s what I told people.
The better we get at modeling user preferences, the more accurately we construct recommendation engines that fully capture user attention. In a way, we are building personalized propaganda engines that feeds users content which makes them feel good and throws away the uncomfortable bits. We used to be able to hold media accountable for misinforming the public. Now we only have ourselves to blame.
We’re in the year 2049. The world has seen an apocalyptic breakdown of all media known to man. There is no more human communication outside the global network of Facebook. A protocol of the end of mass media as we know it.
On Wednesday, nine major publishers began publishing articles straight to Facebook under the social network’s long-anticipated product, called Instant Articles. Facebook sweetened the deal by letting publishers control the ad sales, branding and content; sell ads on the articles and keep all the revenue; and get data on their readers.
Still, publishers were mixed in their embrace: BuzzFeed and NBC News were the only ones to go all in committing to using the product. Others, like The New York Times and the Atlantic, are taking a more cautious approach. There are still plenty of unknowns, chiefly whether Facebook’s terms will remain as generous to publishers as they seem to be now.
On the far left and the far right, users of the social network are stuck in echo chambers of their own making.
Does Facebook filter our political discourse? Last week, the company released a study of user profiles that purported to show that the social network’s News Feed algorithm doesn’t limit our access to diverse and opposing political points of view. Rather, it said, the narrowness of our Facebook conversations is a result of how we naturally behave. Facebook didn’t create the so-called filter bubble, the authors claimed; it merely reflects it.
Is Facebook an echo chamber? Does the social network help us create filter bubbles, through which we’re only exposed to content and opinions that are like our own? According to the company, not really.
In new study published today in the journal Science, Facebook claims that it’s mostly humans, not its News Feed ranking algorithm, that are at fault for making their feeds ideologically consistent.
“While News Feed surfaces content that is slightly more aligned with an individual’s own ideology (based on that person’s actions on Facebook), who they friend and what content they click on are more consequential than the News Feed ranking in terms of how much diverse content they encounter,” according to Facebook’s Data Science page.
Computer scientists have discovered a way to number-crunch an individual’s own preferences to recommend content from others with opposing views. The goal? To burst the “filter bubble” that surrounds us with people we like and content that we agree with.
The state of the media in 2015 begins and ends with the tech giant.
Facebook, it seems, is unstoppable. The social publishing site, just 11 years old, is now the dominant force in American media. It drives a quarter of all web traffic. In turn, Facebook sucks up a huge portion of ad revenue—the money that keeps news organizations running—and holds an enormous captive audience.
It was in Indonesia three years ago that Helani Galpaya first noticed the anomaly. Indonesians surveyed by Galpaya told her that they didn’t use the internet. But in focus groups, they would talk enthusiastically about how much time they spent on Facebook. Galpaya, a researcher (and now CEO) with LIRNEasia, a think tank, called Rohan Samarajiva, her boss at the time, to tell him what she had discovered. “It seemed that in their minds, the Internet did not exist; only Facebook,” he concluded.
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