
Facebook's Filter Bubble Is Getting Worse - walterbell
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/facebooks-filter-bubble
======
creatonez
Tom Steinburg phrases what I've been thinking for years pretty well:
"...urgently tell [facebook] that to not act on this problem now is tantamount
to actively supporting and funding the tearing apart of the fabric of society"

The filter bubble puts artificial divides between people, strengthening those
divides and making it seem as if anyone who disagrees with you is part of a
radical group that all agree with each other. Facebook and Google are tearing
apart the internet community and the results are already showing.

For example, look at the anti-SJW movement. A large chunk of them assume
anyone who calls themselves a "feminist" is batshit insane and also wants
ridiculous things like "safe zones". I doubt such a movement could have popped
up without the filter bubble artificially dividing people on the internet. The
filter bubble silently manipulates how people think, in a very destructive
manner.

~~~
qu4z-2
Also take a look at the feminist movement. A large chunk of them assume that
anyone who calls themselves "anti-SJW" is batshit insane and also wants
ridiculous things like "muslim-free zones". I doubt such a movement could have
popped up without the filter bubble artificially dividing people on the
internet. The filter bubble silently manipulates how people think, in a very
destructive manner.

I agree with you that filter bubbles are a huge problem. I also feel like I
see more and more arguments about ... not the facts, but what opinions each
named group _actually_ has or endorses. There's so much "THIS ONE IDIOT SHOWS
WHAT FEMINISTS ACTUALLY BELIEVE" and "TRUMP SUPPORTERS LITERALLY WANT TO
<bla>". I don't know how much that's been the case historically and whether
it's an increasing trend, but it seems like it happens a lot. My experience
has been that there's a lot of reasonable people in most groups, and then a
few idiots that ruin it for everyone.

How do we mend that gap? How do you persuade people to hang out with people
from a group they believe are "batshit insane" or "inherently aggressive" or
other rubbish like that?

~~~
syngrog66
thank you for making a non-PC/non-SJW aligned post

minor addendum: I do find it amusing that the mainstream mass media discourse
does not seem capable of finding any nuanced intermediate point somewhere in
between the two extremes of "all Muslims are evil" and "perhaps we should
temporarily stop all rubber-stamp-approvals of immigration from
Iraq/Syria/Afghanistan/SaudiArabia/etc/".

And I'd argue that, despite all his imperfections, Trump's stated position was
more closely aligned with the latter than the former. Because... clearly, not
all Muslims are evil. The vast majority, clearly by the data, are not evil in
any objective sense. Yet, at the same time, by any reasonable adult human's
perception there is clearly a phenomenon going on lately where a
disproportionate number of humans are metaphorically going "Allah Akhabar!"
before hitting their detonate button, whether that's for ISIS or Al Qaeda,
etc. We should not discriminate against people purely based on the color of
their skin, of course. At the same time, we the citizens of the USA don't
somehow inherently "owe" anything else to any other random person in the
world, we have not somehow explicitly victimized them by saying, for whatever
reasons, "no, sorry, but right now we do not wish you, in particular, to come
into our country." We have unemployed people here already, we have sick people
here already, we have elderly, we have children, we have debts, we don't
somehow inherently owe you anything or need you specifically.

~~~
morgante
> rubber-stamp-approvals of immigration

If you think that it's a rubber stamp approval for any Muslim from
Iraq/Syria/Afghanistan then you need to get substantially more informed on the
issues.

I suspect you're in the very filter bubble you decry. Seek out some
alternative viewpoints.

~~~
cronjobber
> I suspect you're in the very filter bubble you decry

Looks like _filter bubble_ is going to be the next _Dunning-Kruger._

That's fine, both beat "oh, you're obviously _projecting_ ", if only for
relative novelty value.

------
iamleppert
Facebook is obsessed with optimizing for engagement. If you tend to engage
with things that make you angry or are against your world-view, Facebook will
show you more of it.

I've personally seen this when I commented on a cop killing video. Over the
next few weeks I was shown a lot of the same thing, I assume because their
machine learning algorithm had found out I had engaged with it before and was
goaded me to engage again.

Some people don't engage in that kind of content and as you'd expect they
don't see it. I'm not sure what's worse, deliberate filtering or self-
filtering.

~~~
mrweasel
People don't like to be proven wrong, or even presented with the possibility
that they might be wrong, so we seek out people and media that validate our
existing beliefs. Facebook just makes it a little easier by filtering things
out you would engage with anyway.

Facebook isn't doing this to make our life more comfortable, not directly at
least. It's a just a side effect of being obsessed with user engagement. By
removing the things the user doesn't like, Facebook increases the chance that
the user will stay on the site, and view more ads.

So many fail to understand that Facebook is a business, with all that entails.
It's not a question of Facebook, or Mark Zuckerberg, being good or evil. It's
purely about profitability of Facebook. If more people could understand that,
then maybe they would be less outraged when ever Facebook makes changes.

~~~
loganmhb
Just because Facebook is making these decisions based on profitability doesn't
remove them from the moral sphere, though. If the side effects of the
decisions Facebook makes are substantial (which seems common to me with ad-
based business models) people are perfectly justified in being outraged
because of those side effects, regardless of whether the decisions are good
for Facebook's profits.

------
KaiserPro
_sigh_

Has anyone stopped to think that actually this might just be mirroring human
nature?

We select our friends on who we trust and agree with. We don't actively find a
friend "to provide a bit of variety in our views and opinions" (well, some do,
but they tend to be vein and don't shut up about it)

The secondary part to this problem is the lack of shared news sources. We like
in the middle ages now have effectively have out own vicar for each friendship
group. They are the arbiters of moral decency. (only travellers could compare
and contrast, and they kept them selves to themselves)

The rise of specialist "view" news, motherjones/breitbart to use two extremes
sell the same news but with the facts warped to fit their own world view. This
has always been, but with the rise of competition, the extremes win(because
they angry up the most blood, and get the most clicks)

The thing that ties a country together is a sense of shared values/truth. With
the explosion of custom news sources, leads to diverging values.

In short there are two problems here:

Human social network theory, and the desire to make money through news.

------
adrenalinelol
This isn't a new phenomenon, when there were 3-4 major network outlets did the
masses get "all the news" or was is pre-filtered by monied interests? It was
most certainly the latter, the platform has simply changed.

This is something that is changing w/social media. Most users would rather
have their own biases confirmed instead of challenged; because social media is
just a way of monetizing a user's time, the big players have an incentive to
create an echo-chamber for you, guaranteeing you have a higher probability of
a positive experience when you use your X platform. A similar phenomena is
present in cable news (MSNBC/CNN:neoliberal, Fox News:conservative), anyone
watching will acknowledge the news they are watching IS SKEWED but will watch
it regardless, despite the fact they'll admit it may be altered (thus less
factual).

What will change is how the "channels" are created and maintained. Here is
where Facebook has an ungodly level of power, it wouldn't be hard to divide
the political spectrum into many more pieces than the traditional conservative
and liberal lanes. The amount of possibilities are mind-boggling.

~~~
cageface
I think it is a new phenomenon. The old news networks at least made an effort
to present both sides of most issues. These new filtered feeds just confirm
what you already want to believe.

~~~
andyjdavis
>The old news networks at least made an effort to present both sides of most
issues

I am not sure whether they did that because they wanted to present both sides
or if they just wanted to provide confirmation for what everyone wants to
believe and they lacked the ability to segment their audience. If both sides
of an argument watches the one news program that news program is incentivized
to provide fodder for both sides to avoid losing part of their audience.

~~~
qu4z-2
Does it really matter what their motivations were if they _did_ it, though?
They now have the ability to target ads/content, and they use it. The fact
that they would've before if they could doesn't really change that they didn't
and now they do.

~~~
andyjdavis
I suspect it does matter what their motivations were, at least a little. It is
about not distorting the truth Vs distorting the truth in two opposite ways
that hopefully cancel out. It is still distortion.

------
johndoe4589
It's a very serious issue. I feel like it's been going on with Google for a
long while now. I'm 41 now and maybe I'm getting a bit jaded but I find it
also curious how there is supposedly so many resources and websites out there
and yet I feel like I discover less and less of them.

It's true that it is in our nature like KaiserPro said, but I think in the
early days of Google, you'd find out so much more diversity of content because
websites both small and big were all appearing in search results.

Which makes me realize... in fact it is the content farms which are part of
the problem. They forced search engines to filter more and more of the content
in order to provide quality results.. we end up with a minority of high
traffic sites and the rest of the voices are difficult to find outside of news
aggregators.

------
Yhippa
I'm sure Vice Media is one of the groups that's going to get hard by this so
I'm not surprised.

What if there was a way to connect media consumers to the content they wanted.
If there was a way to subscribe to a certain news publisher and you had
software that aggregated it. Then when you wanted to look at news you had one
place where you could look at all the news you wanted. Wouldn't that be great?
You could even have personalization depending on how often you read certain
articles if you wanted a cherry on top.

~~~
douche
HAHA, Sounds like RSS or Atom... Which apparently aren't cool anymore

~~~
happyslobro
You might be surprised how much support there is for RSS. It is a very easy
way for media sites to integrate with social networks and external services.
They might not show a feed link to an end user, but if you can guess its URL,
then you're in.

~~~
douche
I support RSS/Atom on my site, but I wouldn't expect anyone else to bother, at
this point, unless they are using it to auto-post to facebook or twitter
through other services.

------
jay_kyburz
I don't have much sympathy for media organisations who basically handed this
all to facebook with share buttons and facebook logins.

How about they all get behind a concerted effort to burn facebook down.

Find and / or help build decentralised social media platform and promote the
hell out of it.

I would love to see Google / Microsoft / Apple / Amazon throw a ton of
resources into some kind of open source alternative.

A Firefox project for Social Media.

~~~
grahamburger
How would an open source version be any better for this? Given the choice,
people would still build their own filter bubbles.

(I do think an open social network would be better for a whole bunch of other
reasons, I just don't see that it would help with this.)

------
nbadg
Here's the thing. Chaotic systems with no negative feedback always diverge. If
you put a microphone in a room full of speakers, with no one to turn down the
volume and nothing to switch off the microphone, the white noise will always
blow the speakers.

Filter bubbles are exactly that. They are the social equivalent of a
microphone pointing straight at the speakers.

I'll be honest, when I look at Brexit, Trump, and all of the countless
loudness that has somehow eclipsed the quiet majority, I don't ask myself
"What responsibility do we have to prevent a Trump presidency?", I ask myself,
"How much of this is our fault?"

~~~
3princip
I'd be much more worried about stopping Hillary if I were American. I cannot
imagine a greater catastrophe for the world than her presidency. Guess that
just shows how the bubbles are diverging rapidly.

~~~
type0
As much as I dislike Trump, I dislike Hilary even more, it would be a
Hilarious joke if she becomes the president.

------
lucideer
I haven't read Pariser's book, so apologies if he addresses this perhaps
obvious question, but what exactly are today's "filter bubbles" being compared
unfavourably to?

If it's pre-internet, the situation was surely worse: not only was the overall
level of access lower, and the range of information much narrower, but the
majority of it was likely largely being fed by relatively traditionalist media
institutions. Anything of any diversity would have to be proactively seeked
out by interested, curious individuals, and even that stood a good chance of
coming through an echo-chamber-ish filter bubble of like-minded friends or
narrow-issue sub-cultures?

If on the other hand contemporary filter bubbles are being compared to early
days of the UK internet, there simply wasn't as much adoption of or engagement
with the web then, so the above still applies for most of the population.

------
jbdigriz
It's always great to see lowest common denominator arguments in this debate -
like this happens outside social networks both before they existed and
indefinitely into the future. Immediately after the unsubstantiated claims of
information overload are made, these same companies go ahead and insert
additional entirely unsolicited commercial advertisements into the
feed/results - because business...

Meanwhile the much more genuine solution would be to simply release the deluge
of data and allow the users to curate it themselves - but then they would have
less ability to subliminally compel users and also risk overwhelming/under-
reaching users with ads.

The real problem is the "free service" sham repeatedly echoed as justification
for user tracking. I suspect the not too distant future, it will be common
knowledge that the rampant pillaging of information and user privacy
violations committed by companies like Google and Facebook out of sheer greed
will in fact be the highest cost anyone can pay for a trivial, non-essential
service. In the meantime, I'll continue doing my best to fool these tracking
systems and then complain how they fail to generate the content I desire

------
yAnonymous
>Facebook is becoming an echo chamber that prevents us from being confronted
with opinions we don't agree with.

Google has already been like that for years and yes, it's bad. It certainly
influences the users' view on things if they don't know what's going on. It
also makes Google unsuitable for critical research, unless you know about it
and change the seach queries accordingly.

------
kitd
One aspect overlooked is that social media interactions are largely faceless
and very often completely anonymous. The "other" is just an avatar voicing an
opinion on the screen that either fits with ours or not. This greatly
exacerbates the filter bubble.

Compare this with interactions between live people standing next to each
other. Twice as much communication is available via non-verbal cues, and we
get a much better sense of who they are and where they're coming from.

------
cachvico
I think this is being a bit sensationalist. I often see articles posted by
friends, and under the article there are automatic suggestions of further
articles that counter the article in question. E.g. a link to an article about
a UFO might have under it an auto-suggested link to an article on Snopes about
how the UFO sighting was a hoax.

------
petewailes
The problem here isn't so much that Facebook are doing it, but that people
want it. It gives positive reinforcement of people's own world view, whilst
reducing the amount of media someone has to see that runs counter to that.

In essence, it's a safe space for everyone, whatever their views.

I'd be happy to state that this isn't a good thing, but it's something that
people like and want. I worry that Facebook actively pushing something counter
to this wouldn't have the effect of increasing people's breadth of
understanding, but instead of making them seek out something else to provide
that space.

