The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [55]
“People are actually quite free to talk about [democracy],” Google’s China point man, Kai-Fu Lee, told Thompson in 2006. “I don’t think they care that much. Hey, U.S. democracy, that’s a good form of government. Chinese government, good and stable, that’s a good form of government. Whatever, as long as I get to go to my favorite Web site, see my friends, live happily.” It may not be a coincidence that the Great Firewall stopped blocking pornography recently. “Maybe they are thinking that if Internet users have some porn to look at, then they won’t pay so much attention to political matters,” Michael Anti, a Beijing-based analyst, told the AP.
We usually think about censorship as a process by which governments alter facts and content. When the Internet came along, many hoped it would eliminate censorship altogether—the flow of information would simply be too swift and strong for governments to control. “There’s no question China has been trying to crack down on the Internet,” Bill Clinton told the audience at a March 2000 speech at Johns Hopkins University. “Good luck! That’s sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.”
But in the age of the Internet, it’s still possible for governments to manipulate the truth. The process has just taken a different shape: Rather than simply banning certain words or opinions outright, it’ll increasingly revolve around second-order censorship—the manipulation of curation, context, and the flow of information and attention. And because the filter bubble is primarily controlled by a few centralized companies, it’s not as difficult to adjust this flow on an individual-by-individual basis as you might think. Rather than decentralizing power, as its early proponents predicted, in some ways the Internet is concentrating it.
Lords of the Cloud
To get a sense of how personalization might be used for political ends, I talked to a man named John Rendon.
Rendon affably describes himself as an “information warrior and perception manager.” From the Rendon Group’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.’s, Dupont Circle, he provides those services to dozens of U.S. agencies and foreign governments. When American troops rolled into Kuwait City during the first Iraq war, television cameras captured hundreds of Kuwaitis joyfully waving American flags. “Did you ever stop to wonder,” he asked an audience later, “how the people of Kuwait City, after being held hostage for seven long and painful months, were able to get handheld American flags? And for that matter, the flags of other coalition countries? Well, you now know the answer. That was one of my jobs.”
Much of Rendon’s work is confidential—he enjoys a level of beyond–Top Secret clearance that even high-level intelligence analysts sometimes fail to get. His role in George W. Bush–era pro-U.S. propaganda in Iraq is unclear: While some sources claim he was a central figure in the effort, Rendon denies any involvement. But his dream is quite clear: Rendon wants to see a world where television “can drive the policy process,” where “border patrols [are] replaced by beaming patrols,” and where “you can win without fighting.”
Given all that, I was a bit surprised when the first weapon he referred me to was a very quotidian one: a thesaurus. The key to changing public opinion, Rendon said, is finding different ways to say the same thing. He described a matrix, with extreme language or opinion on one side and mild opinion on the other. By using sentiment analysis to figure out how people in a country felt about an event—say, a new arms deal with the United States—and identify