A filter bubble is a result of our evolving computer algorithms; the idea that your computer gets to know you - knows your likes, dislikes, what you support and what you don’t - and filters the content it shows you to give you things you want to see.
Have you ever been online shopping, maybe on Amazon looking at a certain book. If you were to close the tab and maybe look at an article on the New York Times website, you may see an advertisement for that book on your NYT article. But how does this happen? These websites appear to be completely unrelated, and yet we’re seeing a pattern between them. This is a filter bubble. Your computer is showing you the things it thinks you want to see, based on your browsing history.
If you have a Facebook, this is happening a lot more than you realize. Have you noticed that your Facebook feed is dominated by opinions you agree with? It’s articles centered around things you like, or opinions or articles that match your own. The worst part is, you probably haven’t even noticed this phenomenon. If you look at your Facebook friends, they all definitely don’t have the exact same interests and opinions as you. And yet when you look at your feed, it’s almost completely that sort of content - content that you typically would agree with or be interested in. This is because your Facebook knows you. I know it’s scary, how can a computer algorithm learn my likes and dislikes? My interests and opinions?
If you’re a middle aged Democratic woman on Facebook, chances are most of your friends share the same sort of opinions as you. But it’s not likely that all of your friends are Democrats, there’s bound to be at least one right wing conservative in the mix. Yet those people are disappearing from the news feed altogether. That Democratic Facebook mom isn’t seeing the conservative articles her old college roommate is sharing, Facebook won’t show it to her because it knows she doesn’t like them.
If you mainly use Facebook for cooking videos (I know I do) then your feed begins to become only cooking videos. All your suggested pages are cooking pages. If you’re like me, when I open the Facebook app all I see are videos about cooking or baking, and political articles. This is because Facebook pays attention. It pays attention to the things you like, the things you click on. It begins to tailor your content based on this.
But it’s not just Facebook...
Filter bubbles occur all over our internet, even something as simple and basic as google. My mother is a very liberal Democratic woman who works as a dean in a small liberal arts college here in New Jersey. My dad is a conservative Republican man who works in finance in a large corporation in New York City. They are very much polar opposites of one another. When I asked my mom to google the word “America” on her phone, her search results were drastically different from my father’s results when I asked him to do the same thing. These results were because of filter bubbles,
It’s become hard to find a part of the internet that is not influenced by this practice. The online world around us has become completely dominated by filter bubbles.
But why are filter bubbles bad?
Filter bubbles effectively close us off from the real world. If we’re only interacting with what we already know, it leaves no room for growth, no room for learning or sharing new opinions. How do you know that you so passionately disagree with someone else if you’re really not being exposed to their actual opinions? Filter bubbles create a literal bubble, sheltering us from the real world. They cause the media to cater to our personalities so intensely that we end up not getting the news we really need to see, and halting our growth in society.
