People have forgotten about the filters that have been placed
on our social media or even on Google. This can be summed up through a quote by
Mark Zuckerberg, when he says that people are more likely to click on a story
about a “squirriel dying in your front yard vs. people dying in Africa.”
Facebook edits your newsfeeds, and Google does it as well.
This can be done through assorted algorithms. Google looks at everything you
are doing from what laptop the user is using, the location, demographics of the
user, and everything you are researching online. Two different people can log
on to a search page, social media site, or news webpage and get different results.
This is what is called your filter bubble, which is a result from the different
algorithms that are found on the websites. The problem with filter bubbles is
that we don’t have a choice of what gets in the bubble or what goes out. These algorithms
account for everything you look up on the Internet, along with the frequency
and duration. Algorithms look at the things you are interested in, who you
engage with, and how you spend your time online in order to construct a totally
personalized view of the web and produce results that you would be most likely
to click on. This forms the filter bubble of things that you are most familiar
with and spend time on the most, which can be hurtful if you are trying to
research a new idea or country, and the results you keep getting are things
you’ve seen before.
We need algorithms that are balanced. The idea of “junk
food”— these are articles about pop teen stars and puppies, are fun to read and
may be more successful at getting clicks due to the soft matter of the stories,
but users what users aren’t seeing is what is alarming. When there is a filter
bubble, users won’t be updated about the wars going on around the world. Algorithms
need to have all points of view, what we look at and what we should be looking
at. We may live in 2016 but the web today is biased just as newspapers use to
be in the 1950’s. We need to have the control of what we are seeing and be
aloud to edit are own feeds. People may not know about the truly important
events around the world due to the filter bubble.
I attempted to see if I had a filter bubble when I Googled
“Today’s News”. The first site that popped up was CNN (http://www.cnn.com/). One was about Trump’s
Son-in-law(http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/15/politics/mikes-rogers-leaves-trump-transition-team/index.html),
and other was about a shooting that someone recorded on their phone(http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/16/us/officer-charged-philando-castile-killing/index.html).
Then I went to my Facebook the first two
articles I found were about shopping and
hacking (https://medium.com/@rachelptanner44/this-lazy-online-shopping-trick-saves-you-a-ton-of-money-dc4993b46e0#.jco200yu5),
and the other was about a cooler that people have painter (http://socawlege.com/13-coolers-completely-changed-game-2016/).
This is not the same article you would find if you used the same searches on
your own Google or Facebook. This is due to filter bubbles and algorithms.
We become so trapped in our own filter bubbles due to the
fact of not knowing we have them. This is an uncontrollable problem, Facebook
articles are “junk or fluff stories” but the problem is also on Google with the
biased information I was given.
Photo 2: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/google-algorithm-change/
Photo 3:http://www.thecosmosphere.com/beware-of-online-filter-bubbles/
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