Slashdot Mirror
The Rise of Filter Bubbles
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.
Google has mentioned a number of times that customization is a major feature of their searches. While this summary isn't without cause to be nervous about such a thing, instead of algorithms to correct algorithms, it's no major feat to allow users to disable some of the non-spam related algorithms. In fact, it's no major feat to disable algorithms by subcategory: geographical location, operating system, language, search history, etc.
Especially considering the natural tendency to discard information that is in contradiction to ones personal views on the world. If the actual inputs are then skewed to support that view, then it just gets even more extreme as a person tends to discard the more moderate views in favor of more extreme ones.
I'm "commingle" too in a few minutes.
May also reflect and reinforce your beliefs. What else is new? That's why going out into the real world or college or a new location can be so jarring.
But in real life too!
We grow up in neighborhoods with other people like us, go to schools with kids like us, who have parents that make about the same amount of money as our parents.
We have similar political leanings, drive similar cars, eat similar food.
I'm noticing a pattern here...
is this post filtered? hello? ha looow?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
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.
Shouldn't that apply to individuals too? I mean, gosh not getting both sides of the story, shouldn't the government step in and make sure you get what they feel you REALLY need to see.?
The entire US news media seemed to be consumed by the disappearance (later determined to be murder) of Capitol Hill intern Chandra Levy in a Washington, DC park, and Congressman Gary Condit who was "personal of interest" in the case because of a rumored extramarital affair with the woman, which Condit neither confirmed nor denied. We had stories on this 24x7 day after day covering every possible angle, including maps of the park, computer forensics, expert panels of pop psychologists, reactions from politicians at all levels, daily tracking of public opinion polls, etc.
Summer came and went. Then one day in early September two jet airliners crashed into the World Trade Center.
I was always under the impression that the point of a using Google, or Yahoo, or Bing was to bring you results relevant to what you're searching for. Are we really wanting search providers to insert non-relevant information into our search results? I personally think that would significantly reduce the utility of their services.
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?
just by googling - yay! I knew all these hours watching porn weren't a waste of time.
And the other issue that wasn't brought up is privacy concerns. You can probably infer a lot about someone--perhaps more than they would want to share--by the customized Google search results from a borrowed computer.
Sorry, just thought of one follow up comment...
Yesterday, I was watching the evening news specifically to see my brother being interviewed after his meeting with one of our State's Senators. The first 5 minutes of the program went by covering an issue with FEMA and then the Awards Ceremony, in which I caught his 15 seconds of fame being interviewed by the news crew. The next 5 minutes covered the opening of a levy in Louisiana and some bit of world news. My first reaction was, "Is there really so little happening in our State that you couldn't fill the entire first 10 minutes with State news?"
I wish I could view Slashdot via a filter bubble that would omit or correct dupes, slashvertisements, blogspam and obvious spelling mistakes.
If being constantly bombarded by birth theories is what's required of me to be a reader of the "free press", I think I'll just pick up a subscription to Pravda, thanks.
... is a dissenting view on things. There is no point in my opinion reading stuff I already know (or think I know).
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
The issue here is that these big algorythms are actually tuned to collect and hold and direct attention of users as first priority. Not to hand out accurate info, advice, wisdom, world views etc. I think It is easy to forget that " free " on the net actually means "you pay us with your valuable attention".
This is really interesting stuff... good book that I am reading (too early to review it sorry) http://cliftonchadwick.wordpress.com/2011/01/07/is-the-internet-changing-the-way-you-think-book-review/
Waiting for the other shoe to...
Is this kind of like when all your friends misuse the word commingle, and you end up thinking it means something completely different to what it actually means?
You aren't labeled.
Yes I'm sure that many secretly like to be labeled. Part of the social thing I suppose. Can't blame the web sites for that.
"Well I'm alone, I've got to clone" -Barney
...omphaloskepsis often...
Evidently, this is what people like? I for one don't and I'd like some governments (not just the USA, but how about the EU?) to give people an "opt in" for this sort of behavior. Yes, I'm talking legislation here to mandate such an option for all searches. The "don't follow me" tag currently hyped for some browsers hardly scratches the surface of this phenomenon.
I myself stopped using teh goggles and went to duckduckgo as my primary Internet search provider. Only if they don't give me the info I'm looking for, I use teh goggles or M$ search. With those two, I prefer to make my results as anonymous as possible, but it's hard when you're on someone elses link/computer and if you consistently do it on your own with a static IP, it doesn't help a lot...
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
I prefer fair filtering based exclusively in my input over someone/something deciding what is important enough that noone should miss.
commingle?
mt
This would be a pretty avant-garde line of thinking if there hadn't been an entire book written about it nine years ago ...
Read my blog.
Totally agree, but I don't see the situation getting better .... on a broad scale, the Internet is more like TV, people like what they already know. Sites like Facebook, etc. do so well because you 'feel at home' when you log in.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization#The_Internet
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.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Additional to my adblocking I want filters that remove Donald Trump, Charlie Sheen, Paris Hilton and Lindsey Lohan from all my pages.
Having these filters as an option is a good thing; that's just a tool you can use to refine a search.
Having them on by default and invisible (or obfuscated) is not. In this case, information is being hidden from searchers who may not even realize that filtering is taking place.
The TED page for the speech has a transcript for those who don't have sound, or just don't want to sit through a nine-minute video.
Pariser assumes that the human race is mostly comprised of truly open-minded freethinkers who not only don't mind having their current views - theories? - challenged, they actually relish it on occasion. Sound familiar? Kinda like the Scientific Method?
Pariser is being humorously optimistic. Most people are not like this, for precisely the same reasons that we have political parties and most people aren't scientists practicing the Method every day. Most people WANT what such filter bubbles would give them; they don't want to be challenged. Most people are not open-minded, even as they doggedly insist they are. They are close-minded, dogmatic, and self-delusional... and they LIKE it that way.
As for those in the minority who do admire the Method and are actually freethinking, they are perfectly equipped to get the opposing, contradictory, unexpected viewpoints themselves. They don't need Pariser or anyone else to use threat of force to compel Google or Facebook to hand it to them on a platter.
I'm fairly confident that the majority of people on this website, can discern what is unbiased news, and opinionated reporting.
If I want truth in reporting, I'll watch the actual interview, read the original transcript, or trust an unbiased 1st degree of separation news source that isn't listed in the summary or found . And no. I don't search Google for my news links. I have them memorized. And yes. They do cover every aspect of current civilization.
Yes. Clippy lives!
I found Facebook absolutely and infuriatingly unusable until somebody pointed out that you can route around its filtering with the "Most Recent" link which simply queues up anything you might be interested in sequentially.
Somehow Google is not so obviously enervating, but I agree that we should be able to turn off its helpfulness and force it to a user-neutral search sometimes.
mt
I think Google has their algorithm wrong.
When I am trying to find the latest movie or game, I am always getting Somila Pirates sites.
They need to stop filtering out online piracy and let me freaking get the pirated material I am searching for.
Signed CIO of another search engine that does not filter the shit you really want.
It would be useful to have systems which automatically compare news stories on the same subject and note similarities and differences. Osama bin Laden dead? Checking... CNN. Yes. Fox News. Yes. Al-Jazeera - Yes. China Daily - Yes. Russia Today - Yes. Dawn (Pakistan) Yes. Asharq Al-Awsat - Yes. Reuters quote of statement by al-Queda - Yes. Conclusion: dead.
Simple confirmation bias means even if people get information from all points of view they still manage to reinforce their existing beliefs.
Might as well speed it up a little.
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...
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
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 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.
There was this guy on a forum and I was trying to find him some introductory links on soft/fake raid. But google only presented me advanced and technical results... I had to get behind another IP to find the entry-level information. I suppose google has a good grip on me - i have had a static IP for some years now, with mostly just one browser signature around, and on top of that I'm usually logged in to the google account. I do not have much of a problem with that - personalised results really are a time-saver when I'm hunting for myself. But, as has been noted, there are downsides and so there really should be a toggle on the feature.
FCKGW 09F9 42
These filters, may also be aiding in preventing traffic overloads. My own opinion is against them. Like many of you I prefer to hear/see/realize the whole story and judge intelligently but for most people, they are quite happy to 'looking through rose colored stained glass windows'. Dialing their bandwidth in for efficiency will help keep usage down for us. Ultimately, I wonder how much processor power, electricity, and cooling would be saved by getting rid of non relevant content.
My first reaction was, "Is there really so little happening in our State that you couldn't fill the entire first 10 minutes with State news?"
You are clearly not understanding the economics of news gathering. They can send one reporter to interview someone at the Army Corps of Engineers and get a five minute story which they can feed to every anchor at every affiliate all over the country. In order to cover state news, they would have to have 50 times as many reporters so that they could have 50 different stories instead of just running the same story everywhere. That wouldn't be as profitable, you understand.
People have always filtered their sources of news. This goes back to at least the 19th century. Basically, as literacy became widespread, the phenomenon of self-filtering became widespread. I'm sure it also existed before widespread literacy, but we don't have written records of how illiterate people got their information in ancient Sumeria.
In the 19th century, people in the US and Britain typically subscribed to newspapers that were affiliated with a political party they agreed with, or that had an editorial stance they agreed with. Somehow in the late 20th and early 21st century people have gotten the impression that there was something like journalistic impartiality. An impartial source of news, such as Walter Cronkite, was supposed to even-handedly represent "both sides of the story." Wait, what if the story had more than two sides? What if "both" sides meant the USian Republican and Democratic parties, both of which were ready to bomb the world back into the stone age over the Cuban Missile Crisis? What if "both" sides meant the Republican and Democratic parties, both of which were in favor of the Vietnam War? Of the PATRIOT act? Of the second Iraq war?
Thank god we're not still in the age of Walter Cronkite, the Brady Bunch, and all that other groupthink mass-media. People who couldn't think for themselves could never think for themselves. People who can't think for themselves still can't think for themselves. The difference now is that I have more than 12 TV channels' worth of access to information.
Find free books.
I think people (at least people without actual mental disorders) have a bias against extreme points of view.
Just as a disclosure, I am currently pretty far on the right of the spectrum so feel free to circle the mental wagons if you are on the left. I do like FOX. But I could never sit through Rush Limbaugh. Nor can I hear Hannity without catching myself thinking that this guy only survives on partisan hackery. He may brake 1 or 2 stories of actual importance per year, but that's not enough to justify a program. I would suspect that anyone on the left can make the same statement about Ed Schultz . Although I don't think of him as an angry man. I think of him as a man playing a TV personality of someone who needs medication. It's as hard to be angry at Ed Schultz as it is to be angry at a drunken guy screaming on a street corner. I am sure O'Reilly used to evoke the same reaction from people (he's gotten much milder over the past few years: I am guessing some anger management).
I've said a lot without saying much. So I'll just make the main point I was going for. I think the extreme positions in one's camp only drive people towards the middle. Again, unless the said people have some mental disorders.
By the way, by "extreme" people on the right I do NOT mean Objectivists, Tea Party or Ron Paul voters (not that they don't have their share of extremists, but they are just a tiny minority). These are people with emphasis on specific priorities. Extremists are not the people with emphasis on specific priorities, but the people who don't realize that other priorities exist.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
This seems rather similar to the ideas presented in Cass Sunstein's Republic.com, published in 2001, at least insofar as people end up surrounding themselves with what we want, rather than need, to see. Quoting the book description: "What happens to democracy and free speech if people use the Internet to listen and speak only to the like-minded? What is the benefit of the Internet's unlimited choices if citizens narrowly filter the information they receive? Cass Sunstein first asked these questions in 2001's Republic.com." I'm not sure that this talk expands much on, or even acknowledges, Sunstein's contributions to this topic. Perhaps his ideas got filtered out.
Personally I was shocked to see that the conservatives won a majority in the recent Canadian election, especially since all the information I had been reading on the internet painted them in such a poor light as far as public opinion seemed to be concerned. This actually makes a lot of sense. Perhaps implementing a devils advocate approach to every search; every fifth or tenth item is something that would appeal to someone with polar viewpoints.
and neither does anybody else who shows up on my facebook page.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I call them, "Mediocrity."
In a supposed attempt to perhaps be neutral, I find myself apparently with a somewhat limited number of options for commenting, including: I may or may not understand all or some of your prose, all of which I may or may not agree or disagree with. I hope I have conveyed my interpretation without ambiguity.
Among my set of "daily" tabs is a random wikipedia page, and couple of other random searches.
At least it gives me a chance of seeing something I wouldn't have otherwise seen.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
With your bias turned off. Or perhaps your spin turned off.
This concept in the US from the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s etc. that there can be a "neutral", whatever that means, middle ground point of news view - this can only exist in a country with a large middle class. When that large middle class starts disappearing (and it began disappearing in the 1970s) this concept of one America with the middle class suburban family as a standard starts disappearing as well.
What other political views do I need to hear? I am 37 years old, am in my particular social station and class, and there is nothing Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity, or even Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek have to tell me. I already know what all of their positions are. It goes against my interests. To me it is sort of like betting $100 on the Red Sox and then having someone tell me I should listen to tell me why the Yankees should win the game. It is a waste of my time.
The only people I listen to on the right are people like Ron Paul, or even Alex Jones. But Ron Paul wants the US military's mission to be defending the US instead of all these foreign adventures, Alex Jones complains about how big corporations run the country - so I am listening because we are in agreement about issues like these anyhow.
I knew about this problem 15 years ago. Granted, it was from the perspective of online advertising. (I noticed that an abnormal amount of IBM ads were targetted towards me when I was running OS/2.) Yet it didn't take me long to figure out why Google's results were better than their competitor's when people started arguing over the quality of Microsoft's engine. Not only did Google have years to refine their results for my demographic, but they had years to refine their results for *me*.
My feelings on this are mixed, but mostly negative. In one respect, it allowed me to find what I needed quickly. And let's face it, that's what search engines are about. On the other hand, it also forced me to realize that it was reenforcing my preconceived notions of the world -- may that be from the perspective of myself as an information consumer or from my perspective as a member of the human race. But I largely ignored that until started making changes in my life, changes that meant that I could no longer fit into Google's pigeon hole.
And I think that realization is the biggest problem with the world of data mining. I couldn't give a shit about what businesses or even (God forbid, which I say in all sarcasm) government thinks about me. What I care about is what I think about me, and how that is influencing how I interact with other people. This use of user profiles to reaffirm (in most cases) and shape (in a few cases) one's conceptions of themselves is by far the greatest danger that this tracking presents us.
"Eli Pariser gave a talk at TED which posits that tailoring algorithms are ineffective at creating 'filter bubbles' around each user, failing to restrict the information that reaches you and so the internet exposes you to alternative viewpoints. While you might be happy that liberal and conservative news hits you, and you see the opposing viewpoints and step outside your comfort zone, maybe you'd prefer not to. And now that every site does it, it's becoming a problem of flooding users with too many disparate points of view. Pariser calls for all sites implementing these algorithms to embed in the algorithms 'some sense of reasonable restriction' and also have transparency so you can understand why your Google search might look different than someone with better tastes."
I actually think we're seeing too many sites restricting and filtering information. Even on slashdot I know that the firehose now presents different versions of stories to different people. At least for the moment the shared comments gives the opportunity for interaction and discussion, but frankly I just find it confusing when I'm trying to discuss a different version of the story with someone. And I'm sure it's just a matter of time before we see the stories actually diverge, and slashdot fragments into a dozen bubble storyverses.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I found his talk to be rather elitest when he suggested that the filters only show what I want to see and not what I need to see. It is a rather bold claim for him suggest that there is an underlying necessity to see things that are not relevant to me.
Mark Zuckerberg is right for the most part. The dead squirrel for most people is more relevant than dying people elsewhere. Who is Facebook to tell me that I should be aware of a flood on the other side of the country. I don't care and I don't pretend to care.
Even more so with politics and I rather enjoy that he brought it up because the 'necessity' to hear a challenging opinion, I've only heard from the self loathing progressives like the guy talking. I concede there are people who might care but how many people don't? If I'm a die hard lefty and have my principles carved in stone, why would I give two rips about what some righty has to say about a topic. If I'm pro-choice and they are pro-life, for example, what do I honestly need to hear? If they are for a flat tax and I prefer the progressive tax structure, why do I really need to hear anything about a flat tax. My principle about taxation is carved in the general sense and minor changes to this group or that group is less concerning than the whole structure of the tax code.
Point being, the bubble shows me what I care about. If I really give two shits about Pakistan, I'm sure my algorithm is already tailored. I don't need guys like him telling me whats important when right now, things are filtered already for what I find to be important.
I always thought the point of a search engine is that I want to find something in particular. Filtering helps me get what I want, and this is degrading my experience somehow?
I hit up google to find information. I tend toward raw data, so I don't want any opposing viewpoints there. When my "vaccines caused my child's autism" sister-in-law spouts off some new claim, I look for stuff from studies. I don't really want to know what the opposing view is; my sister-in-law already let me know.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
Search engines are popular or unpopular based on their ability to retrieve requested information. When "personalization" crosses into biasing your views outside the point of utility, it becomes undesirable to the consumer.
There is no evidence this is happening, and many reasons to think it never will.
Most people aren't like the dittoheads who listen to Rush, they actually want a rounded point of view.
I don't see what all the fuss is about! I mean, as far as I can tell, the internet's 99% porn, isn't it...??
He says he wants to see his conservative friends' point of view, but then he never clicks on anything they post. You may have a self-image that says you're a cosmopolitan intellectual open to all points of view, but Facebook and Google have raw data about who you really are. You can complain about what they show you, but it's like complaining that the mirror insists on showing some ugly twit.
of course it does that. it's a cultural artifact which reflects the process it developed out of. that is the general way a brain works. as we search for things, our instinctive subconsciously-directed actions to find our comfort zone and stick to it. the problem they're describing with google is analogous to trying to tell someone a difficult truth. they prefer to first bend toward their comforting delusions, and it takes an amazing subtlety (or a conscientious argument) to influence a stupid person to hear all the right ideas in the right order so that they can personally infer a painful truth. the self-humiliating recognition of ignorance doesn't sit well with anyone's feelings. avoiding that end-result (which is pretty much last on the "want" list) is what drives people to define their relationship to the world. it's very gratifying to feel supported in a safe little bubble where you don't even have to pay attention to anything but your self-satisfaction. challenging your own preference for ego-boosting activities is what keeps people dumb already. how popular would google be if its algorithm responded to people trending to reinforcing disprovable belief by producing results filled with obvious, painful truth which contradicts the way people want to believe? goog's all like: i see you like religion still, let's sow some seeds of doubt in your search results mwah ha haha
Go to a friends house, ask some of their favorite films or TV shows and give them 4 stars for a while in your profile.
There is a problem that your early filtering may prevent you from seeing things that you would like later and you have to shake things up.
Interesting concept. I think it has validity.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I have met a lot of people who really believe that Islam is the religion of peace, everyone is happy in Islamic states, Sharia law does not involve killing people who leave Islam, and that the Quar'an does not instruct Muslims to kill non-Muslims wherever they find them. They are probably having the truth filtered out.
What link? Do I need flash installed to even see links on slashdot now?
Bring back the anchor tags, dammit.
To take the greatest tool for information exchange ever created and render it a feedback loop is extremely cynical. One might even call it evil.
Yeah, it's called Fox News.
... through making votes for independents or small parties seem wasted.
It's called Duverger's Law.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_law
There is already a lot of public info about you in your friend/foe list, that indeed is used by /. to actively filter this very discussion; Google could very well profile that. :-/
The day they manage to correlate this profile with your gmail viewing usage may come; at that time, they'll know who is 1u3hr (even though you don't publish it) and they'll directly mail you proposing a better filter here
Herve S.
He presumes that it is good in and of itself to listen to things you are not interested in. It is not.
He presumes there is a conservative viewpoint that is worth listening to. There is not. At least not in the United States.
I have limited attention and lifespan to spend on the world. Not interested means not interested.
Are we capable of processing and relating to the currently available amount of (diverging) information?
If this issue is a backwards trend, it's one that is only possible because in a reality which has been shaped by the preceding two decades where we've seen a trend with exposure us to an increasing, almost infinite, amount of information.
The core human instinct is to seek and relate to similar peers. We need a "home base" to feel safe, where the things that worry us in some way relate more directly to ourselves and the close peers we identify ourselves with. I don't think we're *really* cognitively equipped to relate to and empathize with an entire world of differing opinions, cultures, and problems.
It's an ideal that must be pursued, because I agree with Eli that we may be digging ourselves (willingly as well as unwillingly) into these "bubbles" of safe havens where we aren't questioned, provoked or adequately challenged. Especially since I believe that knowingly or unknowingly, we all seek these bubbles for the same reason that all this information exists: We simply cannot cope with the sheer magnitude of it. Processing information properly requires relating to it, be it global warming, riots in Lybia and neighboring countries, death camps in North Korea, radiation from Fukushima, US foreign policies, local elections, slaughterings in Darfur, Palestine and Israel, starving children in Africa, Indian workers killing themselves for pennies making our clothes... The list goes on and on, and just writing this fraction of events down which we're all supposed to relate to, makes me want to crawl into a bubble.
So yes, we should make sure that these algorithms don't aide us in our instinct to reclude ourselves, but a 9-minute talk is nothing but a baby step in even explaining the magnitude of the task at hand.
"The US system in contrast has historically had two main partites that mostly share the same political ideology, and work very hard to demonstrate their differences on a limited number of areas, with many of their party members holding some views (and voting for those views) in direct contradition to their partie's political planks. To me the latter is a healthy democracy that has had time to come to a gerneral concensus about things."
Or it is an unhealthy democracy, where many view are not represented by the consensus, and have no hope to ever see the light of day because of the barrier of entry of a 2 party system which are nearly identical except limited area. Whereas those european democracy actually have seen new party crop up , old party die, and be reborn. And that despite what you call an old-buy-club system.
Additionaly, an ecosystem with 2 nearly identical specie (rep and dem) is more stable but is also much more sensible to change in envirionment and can fail to adapt , whereas a system where party can come up and down is less stable politcally, but more adaptable to new data.
IMO a large part of the lowest income population has stopped being represented by both Dem and rep in the USA, and that does not seem to be the sign of an healthy democracy in any way shape or form. But that's my opinion.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
While Pariser's argument is quite convincing I have another reason for disliking smart filters. Whether we are talking about website search or smart command menus the algorithms seem determined to show me the results I am most likely to use based on historical usage. The trouble is these are the websites, commands, menus whatever that I already know exactly how to find BECAUSE I USE THEM EVERY DAY. If google went out of business tomorrow I would still be able to find Slashdot and all the other sites that I use regularly. I don't need a search tool to tell me about these. The real value of search is in finding the stuff I don't use very often and am therefore unlikely to find by myself. Smart filters hide the very results I need search to find.
If I didn't filter, I'd have to wade through all the junk that I *know* isn't true, and give equal time to dealing with creationists and evolutionists. If I filter, I can get rid of the cranks and crackpots and get down to what I want to find.
The prevailing principle here is that people will only find what they are looking for. If you're looking for vague assertions that backup your case, you'll find them. If you're looking for facts that backup your case, you stand a high chance of finding them. But if you're just looking for all the raw data and facts, you'll find them too, and can make up your own mind.
Of course there will be people who only see the data / opinions they want to see. That's their problem, not the world's (except in the context of giving them a metaphorical slap and telling them to grow up) and not their filters.
I recently introduced my 2-year-old daughter to one of her grandparents (who lives 800 miles away). He has a reputation for zaniness and within minutes she'd learned that when he said he was going to steal all her toys, or that he was taking her off to live on an oil rig in the middle of the sea, it was best to ignore him and carry on as normal. She filtered. Without that filter, the distress of the early stages of meeting him would have continued forever. But she still knew when he was actually serious about, say, giving her some chocolate and when he was playing about. The filter is there to do just that - filter the things you don't want to hear or don't care about or don't believe out.
You'll only have an insular existence if that's what you WANT to have.
Only because of this ridiculous notion that we can only digest news if the person talking about it is standing in front of the scene with a five man crew for support. I don't see what's wrong in sending out some researchers to gather the news (hell, it's the information age, they don't really even need to leave the office if they don't want to) and just having the anchor behind the newsdesk read it out. Can we really only process information if it's accompanied by pretty pictures? For local news I'd be more than happy with just hearing the news if it means they can shave the costs and make it more accurate/plentiful.
If you don't want results that are personalized by google, use scroogle's search to search google rather than directly searching google itself.
https://ssl.scroogle.org/
So.... does anybody know of a search engine that gives you honest/unfiltered/un-personalized results..?!?
I know they're all wrong, anyway.... ;)
I'm sorry; I don't know what I was thinking!
It's about transparency and touches on semantic search. Sometimes when I search I just want the answer, not 9 million web pages giving me the world and his wife's opinion about an answer. And sometimes I want - 9 million web pages. This issue goes away if the user has that kind of choice and its easy to make a selection - the slash option described for Blekko is a step but sounds like it's design is as appalling as Google's. It's an interface design issue, just make it obvious - it probably only needs two big buttons...
If you want unfiltered search results on Google, just log out. I learned a while ago that my search results are different if I'm logged in versus being logged out. Unless they are tracking search history for every anonymous cookie, logging out should give you unfiltered results.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
I go through multiple editions of Google News every morning. It has replaced newspapers to a large extent.
Google News always defaults to "Personalized Settings" especially if you are logged into a Google account. And this type of "Personification" is counter productive and not needed. None of us wants an algorithm to determine what news we should see. We do not need this type of "filtering". The counter argument would be Google filters only subject headings - "Business", "Sports" and so on, not the actual news articles. But I doubt.
The solution is to use a browser which has no Google account information / cookies logged in. Its still a pain.
Tat Tvam Asi
This seems to have been derived from proactive marketing. This yields better results for
the person/user which is now determined by this proactive representation of relevant information.
This is why more than ever, social news networks/websites like Slashdot, Reddit, Hacker News,
are needed more that ever. I think this is where facebook will fail and everyone else who don't
follow, progress. I don't trust facebook that much when it gives me certain ads, though I do admit
that giving me the links in my news feed helps I still look to other sites for information not
enclosed in the facebook bubble.
I am my own consumer.
The "main stream" media has been deliberately neutral for a very long time (despite having overwhelming "conservative" ownership). We have not had truly polarized mainstream media since William Randolph Hurst was alive and in control of a lot of the media.
Mainstream media has been neutral in the sense that it does not state its opinions, and instead repeats the opinions of pundits and experts on both sides of the debate, and tries to give the impression of sitting somewhere in the reasonable middle between two extremes... as if the truth always did lie in the middle.
Or in other, and better, words:
Today’s mainstream print and electronic media want to be neutral, unbiased and objective, presenting both or all sides as if they were on the sidelines in a game in which only the players—the government and its opponents—can participate. They have increasingly become common carriers, transmitters of other people’s ideas and thoughts, irrespective of import, relevance and at times even accuracy.
Give these a read: http://www.btcnews.com/btcnews/1851 http://archive.pressthink.org/2008/03/14/pincus_neutrality.html
Left and right, we are all bigots and hypocrites. We want to engineer society to support our particular views which, strangely, usually benefit us in some way.
The biggest hypocrites are often the ones who imagine themselves to be the most liberal. They are truly blind because they truly believe their views are wonderful.
It's not like having read every view under the sun you can adopt every view. You can only select one standpoint and that one standpoint will benefit some and not others.
One of my recurring worries relates to my system-wide ad-filter (you know, these things that act like a proxy and just apply a range of remappings to 127.0.0.1 for all known adservers).
They are very cool, allowing you to benefit from filtering from any browser, including RSS agregators that show html pages, html emails with ads etc.
I suspect they'll develop more and more, and add features quite like the one described here, killing links to sites that I usually avoid to click, etc.
And yes I'm worried. Indeed we may be nearing a bifurcation where internet will shift from an access to "more than before", to a protected access to just people, infos and opinions like yours...
Herve S.
This is #134 on the full list of stuff white people like. http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/full-list-of-stuff-white-people-like/
As someone who works for the MPAA, likes using IE6 and having my junk touched by the TSA, I find slashdot very one sided.
God damn it. Politcs on Slashdot. AGAIN. Wtf??
Or maybe you lived in your own bubble and ignored things that they did right. (I don't know, I'm not Canadian.)
I'm curious to know how such algorithms can personalize search results based on the collective use of my Macbook by 5 family members.
Seeing as this is the moron behind moron.org, excuse me, moveon.org, a group of lefticle trash who are running an 0:infinity track on accomplishing their political goals and predicting destruction of our precious bodily fluids if we don't all become socialists right now, I'm hardly going to click on the link. I'm sure he'd love it if we were all forced to see his opinion on everything, but yes, I'd enjoy a default parameter to exclude him, and support preferences that figure that out. I'm certainly interested in legitimate left commentary. But really, these are the extreme Anti-Fox, Anti-Tea Party, How Can We Dial Up The Idiocy To Another Level losers. I'm amazed anyone would waste bandwidth on them.
I think the filter bubble idea is complete hogwash and as proof to my countertheory, this article which disagrees with my opinion still showed up on my slashdot frontpage.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Jesse Shapiro has done some real research on the segregation of political groups online. Here's the abstract:
Cass Sunstein got rather famous for books Republic.com and Republic.com 2.0 , warning that, "as ... the customization of our communications universe increases, society is in danger of fragmenting, shared communities in danger of dissolving. I listened to Mr. Sunstein speak on his topic, and heard only loose speculation, unsupported by research or rigorous reasoning, so I never read the books. Perhaps there is something more substantial in the books.
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Or more importantly, every discussion on "net neutrality" [...] It is just that such discussions bring out people's viewpoint on whether capitalism is a good thing or a bad thing.
Ideally, under capitalism, one would be free to take one's business to a pro-neutrality competitor. But exclusive rights in land cause often prohibitive entry barriers for last-mile service, which tend to lead to natural monopoly. A lot of Slashdot discussion of net neutrality centers around the merits of natural monopoly.
Not really a problem at all. Let's say the filtering didn't exist -- it wouldn't change people's minds. Most of them would skip over the stuff that didn't affirm their beliefs; the only difference is that it takes them longer to find what they were looking for in the first place.
Someone open-minded enough to want this already gets it and doesn't need it. Someone who wouldn't want it won't benefit from it anyway.
NYT is now also owned by News Corp.
I know New York Post and The Wall Street Journal are published by various units of News Corporation, but since when has News Corporation acquired a controlling interest in The New York Times Company (NYSE: NYT)? According to Wikipedia, much of NYT's stock consists of not traded "class B" shares, and over 90 percent of these are owned by the Ochs family. Or does that article need an update?
It's akin to Christians in the US (the vast majority of people) complaining that they are an oppressed minority beset on all sides by various powerful groups that are actively seeking their persecution.
Or it could be akin to Roman Catholics thinking they are the only real Christians, or Jehovah's Witnesses thinking they are the only real Christians, etc.
The US system in contrast has historically had two main partites that mostly share the same political ideology, and work very hard to demonstrate their differences on a limited number of areas, with many of their party members holding some views (and voting for those views) in direct contradition to their partie's political planks. To me the latter is a healthy democracy that has had time to come to a gerneral concensus about things.
This general consensus between the GOP and the Dems happens to include the notion that expansion of the scope and enforcement of copyright is desirable. Take a wild guess how the pro-copyright filter bubble came to be.
tl;dr
I refuse to read this article, as it does not fit in to my preconceived notions.
I think Eli has a good point. But isn't this how the human psyche has operated all along? Don't we filter out what isn't relevant? In which case isn't there a natural selection advantage for this mode of attention to information? We can't process everything. In fact we can't even process everything relevant these days. It's too overwhelming. I think the point is that it is now relevant to attend to global trends and other information that has never been relevant before. This could be a new twist in our evolution as those of us who adapt prevail.
by Ted King (not Anonymous Coward)
Default? I got a message box asking me which I want.
Their job to return the results a user is most likely to be interested in,
No! Their job is to return the results most relevant to the query. If two people making the same query get different results, they are failing badly!
No, because in "relevant to the query," the intent of the query largely depends on the user.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Yeah, before all those search engines I was confronted with all sorts of opinions. Socialist and capitalist, religiuous and atheist. I talked to Chinese as well as Americans and Africans, who came travelling by at my doorstep, and I had teachers with a plethora of different ideological viewpoints as well as many different foster parents each providing new perspectives.
Then came google and cut me off from all those viewpoints.
Typical TED.
Filter Bubble == Entertainment (or some form of).
Nuff said. Another TED buzz in the making debunked...
This idea that people are being trapped in so-called "filter bubbles" is not new - these days it's the most banal of conventional wisdom. And for all that, it's not even right: mostly what left and right wing blogs (at least) seem to do is read each other, then make fun of the latest intellectual atrocity from the other side. So the idea that people are not even being exposed ideas they don't agree with is kind of silly.
I'm also not aware that Google is filtering my searches based on its interpretation of my political beliefs - at least, if it is, it's not apparent - when I search for any political topic I seem to get several different perspectives on it (unless the two sides are using different terminology to refer to the same thing - then you get what you asked for). I do notice that I can do local search, searches that exclude all but my preferred language, searches that filter "naughty" sites... but I don't seem to be able to search for just the Democratic, Green, Tory, Republican, etc... perspective. So I'm not sure what the TED speaker is even talking about.
This is what I don't understand - how would Google even know what opinions to confirm? I have rather distinct political opinions, but I'm not sure how you'd pick them out from my search terms. And in practice, they don't seem to be doing anything of the sort - I just googled up "global warming" and on the first page were hits from both Fox News and NPR (you can guess the tone of the coverage at each).
I read a number of "liberal" blogs, and you'd be surprised at the number of conservative types who show up in the comments section. Of course, some are simply trolls, but many actually post topics that have some thought behind them. I really think this whole topic is greatly exaggerated.
I'm not going to Facebook to have political debates, and people who use their FB status to do a lot of political diatribes will mostly find themselves defriended.
On the right, you have various GOP governors threatening to secede from the United States over the issue of health care regulation (seriously!), GOP presidential candidates accusing the president of wanting to impose sharia AND atheism, and socialism AND fascism... at the same time, more high GOP officials insisting that talking to your doctor about end of life planning == death panels... I could go on and on.
And on the left, you have... what, exactly, that could compare to this? I really get sick of the false equivalency thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_of_Fealty_(novel) included a passage, early in the story, where the protagonist specified how much contrary news he wanted to see. "Think of it as Evolution in Action"
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA
You use the Tea Party as an example. Americans can't vote for the Tea Party. They have to vote for the Republicans.
In the US you vote for candidates, not parties. That's why you very often see people become senators, congressmen and even presidents who didn't have a long party afiiliation.
In Germany, political top positions are filled with people who have been a professional polititcian since their youth. Exceptions are very rare, I don't think it ever happened for the head of government (Kanzler). In Germany, you're serving a party, and are rewarded by the party with a paid position in the government once the party got elected. Apart from the "professionals", *all* top government functionaries are party affiliate, ie have a membership. That includes judges (county level upwards), state media, military (not sure actually), education and all sorts of other bureaucracts. These people don't have an ideology. They just know what's good for them.
Please don't quote constitutions or law to prove otherwise, these are irrelevant. It's the mentality, that counts, not the system.
In the US, there's a strong political polarisation that's reflected in congress. It might be much stronger than the reflection, but it is reflected.
In Germany, there is no such polarisation. CDU, SPD, FDP, the Greens are really the same ideology when compared to American diversity. There's "The Left" (yes, that's the name of a party) which is left of the rest, but not much. It's only real ideological difference is whether it's ok to have STASI functionaries in government offices, and they have a different opinion because so many of them have a history in the DDR. There's no point at all in voting.
I was raised there, I live there. It was the internet, google that enabled me to see the diversity of American thought. The gap between American pluralism and German conformism can hardly be exagerated.
I don't filter, because I want to see as many sides as I can. But that's me. It's my choice. And no one forces it on me. If my fire-breathing friends on the left or the right want to filter out what they consider opposing points of view, it's their right to do so. We have no right to coerce them into hearing points of view that they consider offensive.