President Trump’s Unlikely Endorsers: Filter Bubbles
By: Rachelle Monteau
How and why did Filter bubbles contribute to the surprising election of Donald Trump?
Many Americans were shocked when Donald Trump was elected as the 45th president of the United States of America. In Jasper Jackson’s article “Eli Pariser: activist whose Filter bubble warnings presaged Trump and Brexit, he explains that if we had listened to Eli Pariser’s warnings about Filter bubbles then President Trump probably wouldn’t of been elected but social media greatly helped.
Filter bubbles are a phenomenon that Eli Pariser is known for. They signify the notion that Google, Facebook, Twitter and other internet functions will filter out “unnecessary” information that might be presented in your feed. The problem that Eli Pariser has with this is that since algorithms and computers are in charge of the filtering, they almost always filter out news that you probably would’ve been interested in. Pariser says “The danger of these filters is that you think you are getting a representative view of the world and you are really, really not, and you don’t know it.” When it comes to the Trump vs. Hilary election, filter bubbles certainly helped President Trump. Just imagine if before the election I was very interested in scandals that Hilary Clinton made, or KKK/ White supremacist stories but I also did find some of the democratic party’s ideas interesting, once the election started I would slowly see that more stories that support Trump and don’t support Clinton would be on my feed because Facebook (for example) filtered all my searches and likes and saw that I was more interested in Anti-Democratic themes. This may not be Facebook’s fault but once fake news started to be made and I had no access to anything else on my feed, that is what I’d believe and follow. The article proves my point by saying “Throughout the campaign, a slew of fabricated articles tapped into the prejudices of pro-Trump…Filter bubbles may not have caused the fake news, but they….helped them spread.” The example I provided was the case with most people on social media since there were so many fake news articles circulating in Trump’s favor. How would someone be able to tell that those articles were fake if everywhere they went, they heard about it, they saw it being shared or discussed? These filter bubbles also applied to news reporters and their social media. That means that even places like Fox News may have skewed information because they found their sources on the Internet. Overall, I think Trump benefitted greatly from Filter bubbles because they ultimately got him more votes.
