Beware online filter bubbles Eli Pariser
Mark Zuckerberg a journalist was asking
him a question about the newsfeed and
the journalist was asking him you know
why is this so important and Zuckerberg
said a squirrel dying in your front yard
may be more relevant to your interests
right now than people dying in Africa
and I want to talk about what a web
based on that idea of relevance might
look like so when I was growing up in a
in a really rural area in Maine you know
the internet meant something very
different to me it meant a connection to
the world it meant something that would
connect us all together and I was sure
that it was going to be great for
democracy and for our society but
there’s this kind of shift in how
information is flowing online and it’s
invisible and if we don’t pay attention
to it it could be a real problem so I
first noticed this in a place I spend a
lot of time my Facebook page
I’m progressive politically big
surprised but I’ve always you know gone
out of my way to meet conservatives I
like hearing what they’re thinking about
I like seeing what they link to I like
learning a thing or two and so I was
kind of surprised when I noticed one day
that the Conservatives had disappeared
from my Facebook feed and what it turned
out was going on was that Facebook was
looking at which links I clicked on and
it was noticing that actually I was
clicking more on my liberal friends
links than on my conservative friends
links and without consulting me about it
it had edited them out they disappeared
so Facebook isn’t the only place that’s
doing this kind of invisible algorithmic
editing of the web Google’s doing it too
if I search for something and you search
for something even right now at the very
same time we may get very different
search results even if you’re logged out
one engineer told me there are 57
signals that Google looks at everything
from what kind of computer you’re on to
what kind of browser you’re using
to where you’re located that uses to
personally tailor your query results
think about it for a second there is no
standard Google anymore and you know the
funny thing about this is that it’s hard
to see you can’t see how different your
search results are from anyone else’s
but a couple of weeks ago I asked a
bunch of friends to Google Egypt and to
send me screenshots of what they got so
here’s my friend Scott’s screenshot and
here’s my friend Daniel screenshot when
you put them side-by-side you don’t even
have to read the links to see how
different these two pages are but when
you do read the links it’s really quite
remarkable Daniel didn’t get anything
about the protests in Egypt at all in
his first page of Google results
Scott’s results were full of them and
this was the big story of the day at
that time
that’s how different these results are
becoming so it’s not just Google on
Facebook either you know this is
something that’s sweeping the web there
are a whole host of companies that are
doing this kind of personalization Yahoo
News the biggest news site on the
internet is now personalized different
people get different things Huffington
Post Washington Post New York Times all
flirting with personalization in various
ways and where this this moves us very
quickly toward a world in which the
Internet is showing us what it thinks we
want to see but not necessarily what we
need to see as Eric Schmidt said it’ll
be very hard for people to watch or
consume something that is not in some
sense been tailored for them so I do
think this is a problem and I think if
you take all of these filters together
if you take all of these algorithms you
get what I call a filter bubble and your
filter bubble is kind of your own
personal unique universe of information
that you live in online and what’s in
your filter bubble depends on who you
are and it depends on what you do but
the thing is that you don’t decide what
gets in and more importantly you don’t
actually see what gets edited
out so one of the problems with the
filter bubble was discovered by some
researchers at Netflix and they were
looking at the Netflix queues and they
noticed something kind of funny that a
lot of us probably have noticed which is
there are some movies that just sort of
zip right up and out to our houses they
enter the queue they just zip right out
so Ironman zips right out right and
Waiting for Superman can wait for a
really long time what they discovered
was that in our Netflix queues there’s
kind of this epic struggle going on
between our future aspirational selves
and our more impulsive present selves
you know we all want to be someone who
has watched Rashomon but right now we
want to watch Ace Ventura for the 4th
time so the best editing gives us a bit
of both it gives us a little bit of
Justin Bieber and a little bit of
Afghanistan it gives us some information
vegetables it gives us some information
dessert and the challenge with these
kind of algorithmic filters these
personalized filters is that because
they’re mainly looking at what you click
on first you know you don’t it can throw
off that balance and instead of a
balanced information diet you can end up
surrounded by information junk food so
what this suggests is actually that we
may have the story about the Internet
wrong in a broadcast society you know
this is how the founding mythology goes
right in a broadcast society there were
these gatekeepers the editors and they
controlled the flows of information and
Along Came the internet and it swept
them out of the way and it allowed us
all of us to connect together and it was
awesome but that’s not actually what’s
happening right now what we’re seeing is
more of a passing of the torch from
human gatekeepers to algorithmic ones
and the thing is that the algorithms
don’t yet have the kind of embedded
ethics that the editors did so if
algorithms are going to curate the world
for us if they’re going to decide what
we get to see and what we don’t get to
see that we need to make sure that
they’re not just
to relevance we need to make sure that
they also show us things that are
uncomfortable or challenging or
important this is what Ted does right
other points of view and the thing is
and we’ve actually kind of been here
before as a society in 1915 it’s not
like newspapers were sweating a lot
about their civic responsibilities then
people kind of noticed that they were
doing something really important that in
fact you couldn’t have a functioning
democracy if citizens didn’t get a good
flow of information that the newspapers
were critical because they were acting
as the filter and that journalistic
ethics developed it wasn’t perfect but
it got us through the last century and
so now we’re kind of back in 1915 on the
web and we need the new gatekeepers to
encode that kind of responsibility into
the code that they’re writing you know I
know there are a lot of people here from
Facebook and from Google Larry and
Sergey who you know people who have
helped build the web as it is and I’m
grateful for that but we really need to
you to make sure that these algorithms
have encoded in them a sense of the
public life a sense of civic
responsibility we need you to make sure
that they’re transparent enough that we
can see what the rules are that
determine what gets through our filters
and we need you to give us some control
so that we can decide what gets through
and what doesn’t because I think we
really need the internet to be that
thing that we all dreamed of it being we
need it to connect us all together we
need it to introduce us to new ideas and
new people and different perspectives
and it’s not going to do that if it
leaves us all isolated in a web of one
thank you
you