The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [59]
Facebook is hardly the only filtering service that will tend toward an antiseptically friendly world. As Eckles pointed out to me, even Twitter, which has a reputation for putting filtering in the hands of its users, has this tendency. Twitter users see most of the tweets of the folks they follow, but if my friend is having an exchange with someone I don’t follow, it doesn’t show up. The intent is entirely innocuous: Twitter is trying not to inundate me with conversations I’m not interested in. But the result is that conversations between my friends (who will tend to be like me) are overrepresented, while conversations that could introduce me to new ideas are obscured.
Of course, friendly doesn’t describe all of the stories that pierce the filter bubble and shape our sense of the political world. As a progressive political news junkie, I get plenty of news about Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. The valence of this news, however, is very predictable: People are posting it to signal their dismay with Beck’s and Palin’s rhetoric and to build a sense of solidarity with their friends, who presumably feel the same way. It’s rare that my assumptions about the world are shaken by what I see in my news feed.
Emotional stories are the ones that generally thrive in the filter bubble. The Wharton School study on the New York Times’s Most Forwarded List, discussed in chapter 2, found that stories that aroused strong feelings—awe, anxiety, anger, happiness—were much more likely to be shared. If television gives us a “mean world,” filter bubbles give us an “emotional world.”
One of the troubling side effects of the friendly world syndrome is that some important public problems will disappear. Few people seek out information about homelessness, or share it, for that matter. In general, dry, complex, slow-moving problems—a lot of the truly significant issues—won’t make the cut. And while we used to rely on human editors to spotlight these crucial problems, their influence is now waning.
Even advertising isn’t necessarily a foolproof way of alerting people to public problems, as the environmental group Oceana found out. In 2004, Oceana was running a campaign urging Royal Caribbean to stop dumping its raw sewage into the sea; as part of the campaign, it took out a Google ad that said “Help us protect the world’s oceans. Join the fight!” After two days, Google pulled the ads, citing “language advocating against the cruise line industry” that was in violation of their general guidelines about taste. Apparently, advertisers that implicated corporations in public issues weren’t welcome.
The filter bubble will often block out the things in our society that are important but complex or unpleasant. It renders them invisible. And it’s not just the issues that disappear. Increasingly, it’s the whole political process.
The Invisible Campaign
When George W. Bush came out of the 2000 election with far fewer votes than Karl Rove expected, Rove set in motion a series of experiments in microtargeted media in Georgia—looking at a wide range of consumer data (“Do you prefer beer or wine?”) to try to predict voting behavior and identify who was persuadable and who could be easily motivated to get to the polls. Though the findings are still secret, legend has it that the methods Rove discovered were at the heart of the GOP’s successful get-out-the-vote strategy in 2002 and 2004.
On the left, Catalist, a firm staffed by former Amazon engineers, has built a database of hundreds of millions of voter profiles. For a fee, organizing and activist groups (including MoveOn) query it to help determine which doors to knock on and to whom to run ads. And that’s just the start. In a memo for fellow progressives, Mark Steitz, one of the primary Democratic data gurus, recently wrote that “targeting too often returns to a bombing metaphor—dropping message from planes. Yet the best data tools help build relationships