Bursting the Filter Bubble

Jah-Wren Ryel writes with news that a few CS folks are working on a way to present opposing viewpoints without angering the reader. From the article: "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. A recent example of the filter bubble at work: Two people who googled the term 'BP.' One received links to investment news about BP while the other received links to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, presumably as a result of some recommendation algorithm." From the paper's abstract: "We found that recommending topically relevant content from authors with opposite views in a baseline interface had a negative emotional effect. We saw that our organic visualization design reverts that effect. We also observed significant individual differences linked to evaluation of recommendations. Our results suggest that organic visualization may revert the negative effects of providing potentially sensitive content."

Comments

Real Population Control is YOU and friends.

[SuperKendall]

Fox News is about population control

It's funny you should mention that, when the major news outlets are all pulling for Obama and hiding things that would effect Democratic elections. Rather than passing along the truth about what Obamacare would do to people's existing insurance plans, that information was buried during the presidential election and the media called Romney a liar for telling us exactly what would happen.

Similarly during the recent government shutdown - the whole reason the Democrats pushed a shutdown upon us (Republicans having passed multiple spending bills in the house which the Democrats would not sign) was that Republicans wanted a one-year delay in the start of Obamacare - which we know now WAS NOT READY FOR LAUNCH, and is still not working fully (nor will it be for some time with crucial backend systems not even built yet!). Yet the press pretended that delaying Obamacare made no sense, when just weeks later we saw quite the opposite was true.

So don't talk to use about Fox and population control, when all of the media who agrees with you ideologically has been furiously pulling strings for well over a decade. You are just mad because someone else is trying to cut your strings...