Facebook's Filter Bubble Is Getting Worse
motherboard.vice.com
motherboard.vice.com
The filter bubble puts artificial divides between people, strengthening those divides and making it seem as if anyone who disagrees with you is part of a radical group that all agree with each other. Facebook and Google are tearing apart the internet community and the results are already showing.
For example, look at the anti-SJW movement. A large chunk of them assume anyone who calls themselves a "feminist" is batshit insane and also wants ridiculous things like "safe zones". I doubt such a movement could have popped up without the filter bubble artificially dividing people on the internet. The filter bubble silently manipulates how people think, in a very destructive manner.
I agree with you that filter bubbles are a huge problem. I also feel like I see more and more arguments about ... not the facts, but what opinions each named group actually has or endorses. There's so much "THIS ONE IDIOT SHOWS WHAT FEMINISTS ACTUALLY BELIEVE" and "TRUMP SUPPORTERS LITERALLY WANT TO <bla>". I don't know how much that's been the case historically and whether it's an increasing trend, but it seems like it happens a lot. My experience has been that there's a lot of reasonable people in most groups, and then a few idiots that ruin it for everyone.
How do we mend that gap? How do you persuade people to hang out with people from a group they believe are "batshit insane" or "inherently aggressive" or other rubbish like that?
Yes, there's a lot of reasonable people, but most of them are part of the problem because they don't have the time or motivation to do the research. They see something like "Why Donald Clinton is the next Hitler and must be stopped at all cost" and just share it without even thinking about the other side of it.
Can we fix it at all? I'm not sure. The best you can do is distance yourself from the crazy people in "your" camp, encourage your "allies" to give the "enemy" view point a fair consideration and hope for the best.
A possible solution is actually what most people who use Facebook claim to want - show users everything their friends post in chronological order. At least that way any 'filter bubble' is of your own making.
minor addendum: I do find it amusing that the mainstream mass media discourse does not seem capable of finding any nuanced intermediate point somewhere in between the two extremes of "all Muslims are evil" and "perhaps we should temporarily stop all rubber-stamp-approvals of immigration from Iraq/Syria/Afghanistan/SaudiArabia/etc/".
And I'd argue that, despite all his imperfections, Trump's stated position was more closely aligned with the latter than the former. Because... clearly, not all Muslims are evil. The vast majority, clearly by the data, are not evil in any objective sense. Yet, at the same time, by any reasonable adult human's perception there is clearly a phenomenon going on lately where a disproportionate number of humans are metaphorically going "Allah Akhabar!" before hitting their detonate button, whether that's for ISIS or Al Qaeda, etc. We should not discriminate against people purely based on the color of their skin, of course. At the same time, we the citizens of the USA don't somehow inherently "owe" anything else to any other random person in the world, we have not somehow explicitly victimized them by saying, for whatever reasons, "no, sorry, but right now we do not wish you, in particular, to come into our country." We have unemployed people here already, we have sick people here already, we have elderly, we have children, we have debts, we don't somehow inherently owe you anything or need you specifically.
If you think that it's a rubber stamp approval for any Muslim from Iraq/Syria/Afghanistan then you need to get substantially more informed on the issues.
I suspect you're in the very filter bubble you decry. Seek out some alternative viewpoints.
Looks like filter bubble is going to be the next Dunning-Kruger.
That's fine, both beat "oh, you're obviously projecting", if only for relative novelty value.
The mass media discourse is, I suspect, bad at middle ground because it turns out reinforcing people's fear and biases sells well. And if it doesn't happen to be true, well, then you get free outrage clicks from everyone else. Even better!
To misquote Pirates of the Caribbean:
"Fox is the worst news channel I've ever watched!" "Ah, but you have watched it!"
I don't know how, but I think one place to start is figuring out how to bypass the actually batshit insane/aggressive ones[0] (on your own side trying to keep you in, and on the other side trying to keep you out), since they effectively are the next barriers you encounter if you actually manage to pop the filter bubble.
Problem is that those groups have vested interests and human beings are likely too social and irrational to refrain from belonging to "inner circles" and construct inane belief systems.
Having a slightly autistic streak might help though, to naturally be less immersed in group-think or feeling the need to belong.
We seem to be able to accept differing tastes in for instance food or temperature/weather, so people are capable to disagree on taste without feeling the need to take that difference to an emotional/irrational level and segregate into clans. I guess liking spicy food isn't generally felt to be a crucial defining factor of one's identity... at least to the level of wanting to attack or murder each other.
Unless of course it is about eating animals or not ;)
The Internet makes it very easy for like-minded people to find each other. For the most part, that's a great thing.
I seriously fail to see how my freedom became empowered through this process, last time I checked, facebook doesn't has an optional "Don't show me anything that would make me even slighly upset"
But can't you tell Facebook to show you everything that your friends post?
You can try.
I gave up trying to get Facebook to show me the newsfeed I wanted to see, not this "Top Stories" thing. Eventually I gave up on Facebook altogether and deleted my account.
I don't think the "filter bubble puts artificial divides" that didn't already exist. I also don't think anything gets "put," or that anything is "artificial," or that there are actual "divides," or that there exists a "filter bubble."
Facebook didn't program something called "filter_bubble.php." Facebook uses a privacy-sensitive collaborative filtering approach to selecting newsfeed items for you. If you're describing the consequences of collaborative filtering for the average person as "filter bubble," then you're describing a human condition that an average person is interested in collaboratively-filterable things. There exists a population for whom the newsfeed probably isn't that interesting, and I bet they don't like Netflix, TV networks, organized categories in book stores, newspaper editorials, etc. either. "Filter bubble" is something that happens to people. Like 5 other commenters cover this ground.
I really object to this idea of "artificial." Really concretely, choosing what you read next based on what you liked about what you read before sounds super natural to me, at least for the average person. Again, there are people who look hard for "both sides," and I'm sure they love reading Consumer Reports, CQ Researcher and Wikipedia Talk Pages all day. I just don't know if the minority behavior is the natural one. Notice there's no algorithm involved here. Whether its Facebook's C.F. or whether it's just you choosing what to read based on what you liked about what you read before, you get the same result. So even if you think C.F. (and basically what everyone does) is "artificial," I wouldn't peg it on Facebook.
And puts? Who forces anyone to read anything?
I don't think anyone gets divided. You might mean becoming less uncertain / more committed to your position. But neutrality is just a vote for the status quo—still taking a side. I think you mean political and social divisions, and what you're discovering maybe is that everyone actually has them, you just didn't know what they were until you could read people's Facebook posts.
> a movement could have popped up
Have some perspective. In _your_ bubble, you'll think "movement." But there are like a billion Facebook users. Hardly any of them—maybe 0.01%, or 100,000 people—will have any idea what an "anti-SJW," "safe zone" or whatever actually means. There's no movement.
We've now created an economy where the only way to get clicks is to make an article that is more angry, more provocative, and more biased than the competing articles. The market is optimizing for values that are far removed from what actually benefits society. And the machine will keep optimizing those values to the point of absurdity. To the point where it tears society apart. To the point where the average reader spends their entire life and never hears an opposing point of view.
Obviously facebook doesn't have a "filter_bubble.php" and literally no one is claiming that. It's understood this is just a natural result of using machine learning to customize newsfeeds. But it is a real result, that has real consequences.
You could maybe even argue that people want this. I'm not sure if that's really true. But it's irrelevant to the argument that it's bad for society as a whole.
Just answer this one question. Do you honestly believe the world is better off with this, than if facebook did something else?
Now as to whether people actually want this, I don't think they do. The problem with collaborative filtering is that the basic assumption is wrong. That if people click or like a post, that means they actually want to see more content like it. Or that if they don't click or like it, they want to see less like that.
This is just obviously false. People like and share things to advertise their political positions. Or at least in the hope that other people will see it. Likewise they don't vote on things they don't want to advertise, or don't want other people to see.
If that sounds confusing, concrete example. On reddit I sometimes read an article that I disagree with slightly. I don't upvote it, because I don't want it to be ranked higher so more people see content I disagree with. Or I don't want to give social rewards to the poster. But I still might want to see more content like it in the future. Maybe I'm interested in the subject, or like arguing about it, or just don't care about occasionally reading stuff I disagree with.
The only way to properly do collaborative filtering is if "likes" and votes are private, and are only used to predict what articles you will like or dislike, nothing else. It can't feel like "liking" is equivalent to a vote for that position, as opposed merely "show me more articles like this".
Then facebook also uses information like whether you clicked on a post. But that just encourages clickbait, articles with provocative or misleading titles. You should only take into account whether people like the article or not, after reading it. Otherwise you are just optimizing for clickbait even the users don't actually want.
Lastly there is just standard false information. If I read an article filled with incorrect arguments and information, I might not know the information is incorrect and like it. On a meta level, I don't really want to see articles with false information. But as a random user, I have no way of knowing that, so just my like behavior doesn't take that value into account, and so wouldn't optimize for it.
I'd argue that newspapers still very much follow and propagate their own political agenda through the tone and treatment of news items.
The sentiment and tone of tabloid* headlines, for example, will be squarely focused on reinforcing their core readership's existing opinions rather than simply informing them of interesting and relevant events, or challenging their viewpoint.
They do. Surely you've seen statuses to the effect of "any one of my friends who supports [belief] can just go and unfriend me so I don't have to unfriend you". Certainly I have friends who are so stridently in support of things I think are unethical/illogical/foolish that I've unfollowed them because their posts make my head hurt. If it weren't for the bubble there'd be a lot more of that.
I don't think people really want to end up like that in the first place. I think if you let them actually decide what articles they want to see, they would choose less extreme ones. The problem with facebook is they have tied "I want to see more articles like this" with "I want other people to see this article", which are slightly different.
Obviously the world is better off without insane political nonsense. Just like it's better off, obviously, without gambling or alcohol, and a whole lot of other stuff... I wish these things could be dealt away with somehow.
I'm trying to avoid the normative question of whether it's good or bad. The people who are most vociferously arguing it's bad are the institutions (like Vice) that stand to lose economically from changes in the Newsfeed recommender.
> the only way to get clicks... only way to properly do collaborative filtering
Facebook has probably had hundreds of highly educated and outside-the-box thinking people looking at the Newsfeed. Someone there has thought of and probably tried every approach to improve the quality of their recommendations using the metrics they are interested in. They probably thought of every possible metric to be interested in, and pathologically optimized the metrics they're interested in, long before advertising was the primary way they made money.
As an example, Facebook got rid of those automatic game posts. Those posted generated absolutely monumental levels of engagement and powered a huge economic engine (Zynga). Facebook got rid of them. Zynga was pissed, and while nobody cried a tear for them, you could certainly imagine some ViceVille.com talking about how bad it is for free to play Facebook game publishers that this automatic game posting thing went away.
Where are all the people talking about how getting rid of automatic game posts puts Facebook users into an entertainment bubble, cutting them off from a vast ecosystem of light entertainment? Some (really blowhard) people could seriously argue that. I don't mean to be a blowhard.
But if it just comes down to, 'Vice is cool, Zynga drools,' well then there's not much to talk about.
Then we agree? Filter bubbles are bad? The world would be better off if Facebook changed?
>Facebook has probably had hundreds of highly educated and outside-the-box thinking people looking at the Newsfeed. Someone there has thought of and probably tried every approach to improve the quality of their recommendations using the metrics they are interested in. They probably thought of every possible metric to be interested in, and pathologically optimized the metrics they're interested in, long before advertising was the primary way they made money.
I'm aware of how optimized it is, but it's built on bad principles. They use a variety of metrics to measure "engagement", including likes, shares, time spent reading a post, comments, hides, etc. But none of these metrics are perfect, and so optimizing for them leads to bad outcomes.
The only objectively perfect measure would be to actually ask individuals what articles they want to see more of, or less of, after they read them. To my knowledge they don't do that
I think your games analogy is perfect. Facebook games generated huge amounts of engagement and ad money, just like clickbait garbage is doing now. But it was having a negative effect on society, with countless people becoming addicted to clicking cows, and some losing vast amounts of money to their addiction. Facebook chose to sacrifice it for the public good (and their image), and I think they did the right thing.
Filtering feeds is necessary in flood of data and people will always flock those with similar outlooks but filtering specific search results is censorship and deception and is putting up an invisible barrier between communities.
Agree about the liking needing to be private. I would love them to add a bullshit button to comments so I can vote down illogical and facile arguments that have resorted to name calling.
In the US maybe, but in countries like the UK you have people who will read nothing but the Daily Mail, and all those newspapers compete largely though "clickbait" headlines http://leftfootforward.org/images/2015/02/Tabloid-scaremonge...
While the West is relatively sane at the moment, there are still a lot of tyrannical regimes in the world telling us how fucked up things can easily become.
most nuts? North Korea. but they keep it in-house. less nuts? pick random Muslim/MidEast/African nation, but they allow it to leak out. For whatever reasons/excuses.
The only direct external threat NK poses is to South Korea and most of the posturing around nuclear weapons and such have for a long time simply been used as a bargaining chip (because NK has literally nothing else to offer than "not try to build nukes").
Obama has snubbed Putin by calling Russia a "regional power" but I think that label is far more adequate for NK than for anybody else. NK's only real ally is China and China would probably drop it the second NK tries to seriously do anything that would harm China's trade (like, say, launching an attack on the US).
I guess NK is the only discernible obvious "bad guy" nation state we have left. China is a close trade partner, Russia is too well-spoken (though it's still good for the occasional Red Scare in the US) and nobody can really tell the desert countries apart anyway (plus "nations" like ISIS are making it hard to reason about individual countries and their political affiliations the way we like to).
Iran is still another "bad boy" state, as long as the US is aligned with Sunni states.
I guess US Middle East / Arab politics boils down to "we hate whoever is threatening Israel".
I have to assume this is political scaremongering thanks to Hillary winning the nomination.
I've personally seen this when I commented on a cop killing video. Over the next few weeks I was shown a lot of the same thing, I assume because their machine learning algorithm had found out I had engaged with it before and was goaded me to engage again.
Some people don't engage in that kind of content and as you'd expect they don't see it. I'm not sure what's worse, deliberate filtering or self-filtering.
Facebook isn't doing this to make our life more comfortable, not directly at least. It's a just a side effect of being obsessed with user engagement. By removing the things the user doesn't like, Facebook increases the chance that the user will stay on the site, and view more ads.
So many fail to understand that Facebook is a business, with all that entails. It's not a question of Facebook, or Mark Zuckerberg, being good or evil. It's purely about profitability of Facebook. If more people could understand that, then maybe they would be less outraged when ever Facebook makes changes.
Has anyone stopped to think that actually this might just be mirroring human nature?
We select our friends on who we trust and agree with. We don't actively find a friend "to provide a bit of variety in our views and opinions" (well, some do, but they tend to be vein and don't shut up about it)
The secondary part to this problem is the lack of shared news sources. We like in the middle ages now have effectively have out own vicar for each friendship group. They are the arbiters of moral decency. (only travellers could compare and contrast, and they kept them selves to themselves)
The rise of specialist "view" news, motherjones/breitbart to use two extremes sell the same news but with the facts warped to fit their own world view. This has always been, but with the rise of competition, the extremes win(because they angry up the most blood, and get the most clicks)
The thing that ties a country together is a sense of shared values/truth. With the explosion of custom news sources, leads to diverging values.
In short there are two problems here:
Human social network theory, and the desire to make money through news.
This is something that is changing w/social media. Most users would rather have their own biases confirmed instead of challenged; because social media is just a way of monetizing a user's time, the big players have an incentive to create an echo-chamber for you, guaranteeing you have a higher probability of a positive experience when you use your X platform. A similar phenomena is present in cable news (MSNBC/CNN:neoliberal, Fox News:conservative), anyone watching will acknowledge the news they are watching IS SKEWED but will watch it regardless, despite the fact they'll admit it may be altered (thus less factual).
What will change is how the "channels" are created and maintained. Here is where Facebook has an ungodly level of power, it wouldn't be hard to divide the political spectrum into many more pieces than the traditional conservative and liberal lanes. The amount of possibilities are mind-boggling.
I am not sure whether they did that because they wanted to present both sides or if they just wanted to provide confirmation for what everyone wants to believe and they lacked the ability to segment their audience. If both sides of an argument watches the one news program that news program is incentivized to provide fodder for both sides to avoid losing part of their audience.
With great power comes great responsibility. The Zuck is some sort of IRL spider pulling the string on his giant web. I don't think he considers himself ethically responsible for any social implications of what his business is doing and I fear the day when he gets more and more into politics.
It's true that it is in our nature like KaiserPro said, but I think in the early days of Google, you'd find out so much more diversity of content because websites both small and big were all appearing in search results.
Which makes me realize... in fact it is the content farms which are part of the problem. They forced search engines to filter more and more of the content in order to provide quality results.. we end up with a minority of high traffic sites and the rest of the voices are difficult to find outside of news aggregators.
What if there was a way to connect media consumers to the content they wanted. If there was a way to subscribe to a certain news publisher and you had software that aggregated it. Then when you wanted to look at news you had one place where you could look at all the news you wanted. Wouldn't that be great? You could even have personalization depending on how often you read certain articles if you wanted a cherry on top.
However, it is really difficult for a company like Flipboard to change user habits and compete with Facebook. Users are already in their platform. I think we must hold these companies to a higher standard..
It gives you this kind of entertainment: > Facebook’s Algorithm is Like the Mafia (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhbEUKHsGi4)
(Reader)
Though alternatives exist.
How about they all get behind a concerted effort to burn facebook down.
Find and / or help build decentralised social media platform and promote the hell out of it.
I would love to see Google / Microsoft / Apple / Amazon throw a ton of resources into some kind of open source alternative.
A Firefox project for Social Media.
(I do think an open social network would be better for a whole bunch of other reasons, I just don't see that it would help with this.)
The social media space doesn't do well with multiple environments as they're non-compatible by nature; that is, Facebook doesn't want to facilitate your G+ experience, they want you to share on Facebook. Before social media, myspace didn't want you on...whatever else was out there, they wanted you on myspace. It's the same issue that used to happen with "what chat do you guys use?" when meeting new friends. Back in the day you'd have to have an AIM, YIM, and MSN account at a minimum, and then IRC or ICQ for a few one-offs. Now it's what apps you use on your phone, or do you wanna use Skype, Hangouts, or Messenger/Facetime, and so on. Switching was always a pain because it'd mean making a trade-off on what you want to run, when, and what accounts you want to keep up. When it comes to social media, the gambit is bigger, since you have more to transfer and more to lose out on if you switch services and no one else follows.
The point I'm trying to make is that the elements of social media are based upon the invasiveness and omnipresence of it - switching is disincentivized due to the difficulty of switching and the fact that often it's just the users who make up the medium, not the aspects of the medium itself. A decentralized privacy conscious medium would be great, but it's useless if no one uses it. And there's just not a lot of reason to switch to such a thing, especially since facebook et.al. shadow profile you even if you don't use them; they still get their marketing money whether or not you log in, they still get your data, they still get everything.
Filter bubbles are exactly that. They are the social equivalent of a microphone pointing straight at the speakers.
I'll be honest, when I look at Brexit, Trump, and all of the countless loudness that has somehow eclipsed the quiet majority, I don't ask myself "What responsibility do we have to prevent a Trump presidency?", I ask myself, "How much of this is our fault?"
If it's pre-internet, the situation was surely worse: not only was the overall level of access lower, and the range of information much narrower, but the majority of it was likely largely being fed by relatively traditionalist media institutions. Anything of any diversity would have to be proactively seeked out by interested, curious individuals, and even that stood a good chance of coming through an echo-chamber-ish filter bubble of like-minded friends or narrow-issue sub-cultures?
If on the other hand contemporary filter bubbles are being compared to early days of the UK internet, there simply wasn't as much adoption of or engagement with the web then, so the above still applies for most of the population.
Meanwhile the much more genuine solution would be to simply release the deluge of data and allow the users to curate it themselves - but then they would have less ability to subliminally compel users and also risk overwhelming/under-reaching users with ads.
The real problem is the "free service" sham repeatedly echoed as justification for user tracking. I suspect the not too distant future, it will be common knowledge that the rampant pillaging of information and user privacy violations committed by companies like Google and Facebook out of sheer greed will in fact be the highest cost anyone can pay for a trivial, non-essential service. In the meantime, I'll continue doing my best to fool these tracking systems and then complain how they fail to generate the content I desire
Google has already been like that for years and yes, it's bad. It certainly influences the users' view on things if they don't know what's going on. It also makes Google unsuitable for critical research, unless you know about it and change the seach queries accordingly.
Compare this with interactions between live people standing next to each other. Twice as much communication is available via non-verbal cues, and we get a much better sense of who they are and where they're coming from.
In essence, it's a safe space for everyone, whatever their views.
I'd be happy to state that this isn't a good thing, but it's something that people like and want. I worry that Facebook actively pushing something counter to this wouldn't have the effect of increasing people's breadth of understanding, but instead of making them seek out something else to provide that space.