Few people are actually trapped in filter bubbles. Why do they say they are?

Niemanlab seem a bit confused here.

People have _always_ been in self-created filter bubbles - its called Confirmation Bias.

The concern with Google and Facebook and YouTube is that they are now re-inforcing that confirmation bias even more.

NiemanLab cite a few studies here but them seem to be focusing on Google Search Results whereas things like Facebook Walls and the way YouTube recommends 'extreme' points of view on any given topic are also of concern.

Essentially a huge part of the internet is now optimising for clicks, which means targeted clickbait and sensationalism will always crowd out reasoned argument.

In my experience, few people are NOT trapped in a filter bubble. If you've ever moved from a conservative area to a liberal area of the country, or vice versa, you'll feel this in your interactions with people. In modern politics, it's far more difficult to find people who are able to constructively engage with both sides than it is to find blatant partisans. Simple test for this is to ask some one to describe the positions of the other party and why they feel the way they do without using any disparaging or cynical terms. Fun experiment, I invite you to try it.

"Filter Bubbles" are a real phenomenon to be wary of, particularly for something like YouTube that aggressively suggests videos and autoplays by default or Facebook that injects stories into your news feed. I think what the article misses on that front is not that users don't have access to other sources, but they're passively spoon fed stories that reinforce their beliefs.

But I'm not convinced this expands to Search. Search algorithm implementations are enough of a nebulous black box that it makes for a convincing story, and Duck Duck Go has been shamelessly spinning that FUD for advertising, but the claims don't really stand up to scrutiny.

This is just tangential personal reflection but I feel like at every stage in my life I've been in some kind of bubble. Bubbles come and go depending on my environment and life experience. Being situated on a university campus, mostly insulated from the concerns of the real world and free to exercise the curiosities of youth -- that was probably my first big bubble. I had no access to or understanding of the concerns of most people working to make a living or raising families. Similarly I can think of periods of time when I was in a bad relationship, or stuck at a menial job. My day-to-day experience constitutes a filter bubble, and I don't even think it's good or bad. I feel like the media bubbles under discussion are symptomatic of a larger cultural malady in which our experience, our own personal bubbles, are so confused and impoverished that we jump at any screen or soundbite just to have some medium through which to experience anything.

I wonder if anyone is banking on a reversal of that perception of "filter bubbles"?

It seems to me that creating "filter bubbles" not only should be the goal of social networks, but that it's a desirable goal.

Obviously, someone will have to come up with better branding to wash off the stink from that term, but the underlying concept is what people fundamentally want, and it's here to stay.

Facebook recently changed their vision statement to talk about making communities more tightly-knit, and so on. This can only be done by curating content and limiting information to stuff that attracts people together and makes them feel at home.

People have limited time and attention. Dunbar's number imposes constraints on how much data/people they can keep up with. And people want that circle to be as pleasant an experience as possible.

I'll be the first to make that bet if no one else has: the social network that will displace Facebook will displace it because it will embrace filter bubbles, not "solve" them as if they were a problem.

An anecdote: When Bush Sr. died, I saw ~30 different comments and tweets about how sick they were of the constant barrage of praise for whom they surmised to be a war criminal, and yet I did not see one single bit of positive words spoken about him. It was splash of cold water awakening me to the depth of my filter bubble.

My parents are completely in a Fox News bubble and so are lots of other people unfortunately. It changed their views completely. Prior to Fox News they were reasonable humans that saw things in a rounded way and that eroded upon repeated exposure to it. I wish they had never gotten cable.

This article is attacking a strawman, defining filter bubble extremely narrowly.

I am not sure what I did with my filter bubble. Did I make it stronger or weaker, larger or smaller?

The polarisation on twitter and Facebook after Brexit and the two years before and after the US election saw the losing tribe write off the other half as evil, selfish, needing to be re-educated, that democracy was over and a strong left hand was needed and that the free press needed regulation.

These were views by some of you, CTO level educated SV technologists.

I pointed out that the opposition wasn't evil, democracy was still valid, and mainly i pointed out how they were blinkered. Some people took it personally. Now they are not in my filter bubble. Worth saying that the winning tribalism was not in my filter bubble at any point.

My bubble has less tribalism than before but it's also less large.

This is a pretty pointless and contentless article.

As others have pointed out, it's attacking a strawman, so the point isn't even relevant. But even if it were, what's the conclusion? There's a graph of people's trust in media, and some quotes from DDG's marketing—neither of which seem relevant to the central point.

> are filter bubbles really the problem here? Danny Sullivan [...] argues fairly persuasively that they’re not because even DuckDuckGo users see different results.

What is this sentence? Argues conclusively what? If anything, it supports the thesis that they exist (by this article's awkward definition), since they also pervade even DDG.

In my experience the same people that complain about filter bubbles also want offensive content gone. It seems the underlying motivation is just "show more of my beliefs less of theirs".

In my experience there are some good tests for this on various noteworthy political events in recent times.

For example if you think that President Trump gave a press conference in which he referred to neo Nazis as very fine people, you are in a bubble because the context and quote are the exact opposite which he later clarifies when asked by the reporter, saying "I'm not talking about the Neo Nazis".

If you believe that Hillary Clinton sold 20% of the USA's uranium to Russia in exchange for donations then you are in a bubble because that characterization is missing several key pieces of information.

People treat future events based on what they have preconceived in these erroneous ways. The media distorts something with a tiny grain of truth into a narrative, and that narrative is what remains as a criteria for filtering future information.

When you interact with ideologically entrenched folks, you can easily poke holes using examples like this. If they are reasonable they will recognize what has happened to them. If not reasonable, there will be cognitive dissonance and excuses as to why their belief is still right. The latter are not worth engaging with further because it's an uphill battle that will likely yield no progress.

Media organizations like CNN and Fox News have become brazen in this regard. Recently CNN had a participant on a panel masquerading as a Trump voter, who was revealed to have a YouTube channel that espoused the exact opposite view. On a similar panel, key parts of answers on voter fraud were edited out of the final broadcast to make the respondent look uninformed, when they had, in fact, answered the question citing sources and narrating a great deal of information.

Market forces have moved the keepers of the "Gated institutional narrative" further towards the new clickbait, ideological, tabloid brand of journalism, and we are all worse off for it.

Just because people may visit other news sources, they can still be in a Facebook filter bubble where everyone in their newsfeed thinks just like them.

At least, that's how my facebook newsfeed looks, most of my Facebook friends/family have similar political views as me, so my news feed is full of stories and comments backing up my own political views. So even if I read opposing viewpoints in other news sites, my newsfeed still reinforces that those opposing viewpoints are invalid, and it makes it seem like everyone agrees with me.

The author seems to miss the point of filter bubbles.

There's a known cognitive bias where people tend to seek out information that mainly validates their existing views. Filter bubbles become a major enabler of that, allowing them to develop horse blinders to reality. Filter bubbles can lead people down into more extremist views that don't mesh with reality, rather than giving them exposure to counterarguments and allowing them to develop a more well-rounded view.

I wonder how one would go about actually quantifying any of this?

The article tries to use two different studies to do this, but this approach seems flawed for the very simple reason that participants are not the same across both studies.

Imho this whole problem is very comparable to being biased in general. We are all biased in some way or another and I like to think most of us are aware of this reality.

But being aware of it does not simply translate to being aware of the full extent of the biases or lead to an outcome where the bias is "negated", if it is as easy as that, then barely anybody should be biased.

In a way, it's like trying to define what goes on inside a blind spot, which by definition, is kinda impossible: If you'd be aware of your blind spot, it wouldn't be a blind spot anymore.

I see the same problem with "filter bubbles", which in a way are just systemic biases very comparable how different social circles have different Overton windows. Most of these seem not to be forced upon people but are rather consequences of choices made based on personal biases/the Overton window often heavily influenced by in ones peer groups.

While one might be aware of these choices, and how one reasoned them, that does not entail knowledge about the reality of other, maybe equally valid, choices. In that context, a lot of this feels more like a philosophical problem than an actual social one. People will, for the most part, rationalize their own choices as the "most valid ones".

If they wouldn't, then they wouldn't have made those choices because only very few people make irrational choices on purpose for the sake of acting irrational.

> Few people are in complete filter bubbles in which they only consume, say, Fox News

Sure, if you only want to count "complete" filter bubbles in which 100% of your search results come from a single source.

Averaged over millions of people and billions of searches, however, even a 10% bias is likely to have a measurable effect.

People don't get pushed over to one side of a partisan issue overnight. Like a pollutant in your drinking water, it takes a long time of constant exposure to unbalanced news for the subtle biases to seep into your brain and change how you see the world.

This is not what’s filter bubble is, it’s a subset of the broader idea.

>We’re not trapped in filter bubbles, but we like to act as if we are. Few people are in complete filter bubbles in which they only consume, say, Fox News, Matt Grossmann writes in a new report for Knight

That's irrelevant. It's enough that their biases are regularly reinforced by the sources they follow (something modern social media and news aggregators make extremely easy), they don't have to "only consume" their side of the story.

Regarding the point about filter bubbling in DuckDuckGo: My guess would be that it's not a trivial problem for them to undo the filter bubbling that their search providers are doing. But, I think if three people were to hit the "refresh" button 10 times on the same query, then the variation seen by one single person is probably similar to the variation seen across different people running the same query.

Perhaps not entirely, but do filter bubbles become an issue when an individual is isolated in the same community for most of their life? I've slowly traveled outwards from my hometown of 2000~ people to now living in a city of 300k+, I've been to a few places between then and now but while my internet bubble has always been there, it hasn't consumed me.

Ironically, Pandora's whole point is to create the musical equivalent of filter bubbles, and it's really cool.

This article doesn't really have a lot of meat to it.

Despite that, I am very skeptical of the filter bubble idea and especially as it relates to customized internet search results. I found Eli Pariser's book to be very unconvincing. It is full of qualifiers like "might," "could," and "may" and few hard facts.

To a degree we have always been in some kind of bubble because we aren't omniscient. Before electronic media, our knowledge of things outside our immediate circle was very limited. Was that a filter bubble? During the heyday of newspapers when a city had multiple newspapers there would be explicitly liberal and conservative newspapers (growing up my hometown newspaper was the Republican!)

I feel like now I know a lot more about people who disagree with me than I ever did. I may not understand them but I know that Trump supporters, flat earthers, creationists, anti-vaxers, and people who care about sports all exist.

The idea that people who report being intensely allied to particular political parties would automatically be the people who we should be most concerned about being in filter bubbles is bizarre, and is part of a broader media narrative that all opinions right or left of the NYT and WaPo editorial pages are the result of manipulation. This seems like one of a cluster of centrist articles attempting to debunk this idea, specifically targeted at Republican bleating about tech-media companies hiding left-wing bias behind claims that they have objective algorithms that have no particular political content.

They're twisting the finding, culled from mashing together a number of studies (not any particular study) and summarized in a whitepaper, that find when you monitor the people who self-report the most partisan consumption of news, it turns out that they actually read a lot of different sources. In other words, they've discovered that the most angry readers of news spend as much time hate-reading as reading outlets that they agree with.

Interesting finding by itself. Instead of reporting that, though, they transform the group that most self-reports being in what the authors would call a filter bubble (i.e. they report only watching Maddow or only watching Fox) into the group most likely in a filter bubble, they find that group to not be in a filter bubble, then they declare the non-existence of filter bubbles. It's really garbled logic.

I'd submit that the people most likely to be affected by a filter bubble would be the people who read political news the least, and where the few examples of what they look up would create a skewed algorithmic perception of their interests. I'd further submit that those people would far outnumber the extreme party partisans, but their votes would count equally, so the fact that extreme partisans who are already absolutely sure how they will vote are not trapped in filter bubbles is of far less importance than the people who are not sure about how they will vote, and are affected by new information.

Let's be honest: without filter bubbles, (social) media would be pretty much unbearable.

Beyond the filter bubble, I've noticed that a lot media spends most of their time in personal attacks, and very little time discussing the substance of any issue. Even when the discussion actually contains any substance, authors cannot refrain from poisoning the well. It isn't Person A believes ..., and Person B points to research ..., it is Left-wing ideologue idiot Person A believes crazy idea ...and well-respected patriot Person B point to research ... Both left and right partisan authors are using this style.

I raise this point in a discussion about filter bubbles since I'm suspect the two aspects are self-reinforcing.

There's an interesting phenomenon here in the UK where a lot of the quality journalism on the right is behind a paywall, whereas a lot of the quality journalism on the left is ad-funded and freely available. I can see that being a potential amplifier of 'filter bubbles'.

For self-victimization, apparently.