Jonas Lund Annotation-Filter-Bubbles

In the TED talk ‘Beware online "filter bubbles"’ (Feb 2011) Eli Pariser introduces the concept of filter bubbles.

Eli Pariser, 1980, is an Internet activist, former Executive Director of MoveOn.org, an non-profit political action committee, and published the book The filter bubble : what the Internet is hiding from you in 2011.

Praiser noticed, by looking at his Facebook news feed, that at a certain moment all of his republican friends didn’t appear anymore. The algorithm Facebook used to select what content was displayed had analyzed his recent activity and deemed the republican friends as less interesting and replaced them with his democratic friends, which shared his political views.

Praiser describes this phenomena as being in a filter bubble, a state in which the content you see is personalized and tailored based on your previous actions, such as location, web history, comments and Facebook likes. As a user you’re not aware of it and you don’t see what’s outside the bubble. It can be described as a type of online censorship.

The risks of letting an algorithm dictate what content a user is exposed to are, according to Praiser, great as they keep users from seeing opposing views in a political and social context. As an example in the talk, Praiser shows two screenshots from two of his friends, both performing a Google search for ‘Egypt’ during the times of the riots. One friends sees holiday recommendations, the other information about the ongoing riots.

Opposing views

Continuation