Diary of an ex-banker: filter bubbles and why they matter

Published in

The Startup

9 min readApr 27, 2018

It was back in 2016, with the election of Trump and the Brexit Referendum result that I first became interested in filter bubbles, how they affected our lives and how we could pierce them. This is what put me on the path to set up Just Six Questions.

Back then, I was living in central London and working for an investment bank. I vividly remember the morning after the Brexit vote, going into the office and seeing my colleagues walking around blurry eyed and in disbelief. There were few other topics of conversation in the City’s many wine bars!

What is a “filter bubble”?

So what exactly is a “filter bubble”.

Wikipedia defines one as:

“…a state of intellectual isolation that can result from personalized searches when a website algorithm selectively guesses what information a user would like to see based on information about the user, such as location, past click-behaviour and search history. As a result, users become separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoints, effectively isolating them in their own cultural or ideological bubbles.”

The term ‘filter bubble’ first came to our attention around 2011 with the publication of the book “The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You” by Eli Pariser.

Pariser gives the example of two friends he asked to carry out identical searches for “BP” using Google in Spring 2010 when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig was still spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Both friends were similar in that they were “educated white left-leaning women living in the Northeast [of the US]”. Yet one friend was shown investment news for British Petroleum as her search results with no mention of the oil spill. Conversely, the other friend was presented with news and the first page of results had links to oil spill stories. One friend had 180 million search results whilst the other had only 139 million.

So, Pariser tells us, Google is filtering or personalising results to reflect the interests of each person. He believes that this creates a bubble where users get significantly less contact with contradicting viewpoints, causing the user to become intellectually isolated.

Of course, filtering and personalisation are no secret. As far back as 2009 Google announced it would give personalised search results for everyone based on 57 signals, such as location and search history.

There is some debate about the extent and impact of filtering, but even a Facebook-funded study in 2015 concluded:

“People encountered roughly 15% less cross-cutting content [content that cuts across ideological lines] in news feeds due to algorithmic ranking…”

Filter bubbles aren’t new

But filter bubbles aren’t new.

We’ve always chosen which newspapers to read or who to hang out with.

I’m happy to admit that I grew up in a family where we had the Daily Express delivered every day. Why? Because this reflected my father’s view of the world. Now, clearly, the Daily Express selects 1) the stories that it publishes and 2) how it reports those stories. By choosing to read a particular newspaper you are choosing which shade of tinted spectacles you wish to see the world through.

Randomly I just googled “Dogs Daily Express” and the first story was:

The article starts: “The man in his 20s — only known as Nikolay — told officers it was normal in his home country of Kazakhstan to catch and eat the dogs.”

I can already see my father at the breakfast table shaking his head and expressing a mixture of amusement and disgust.

Of course, reading a particular newspaper was only one way in which my father created his own bubble. He was a keen sportsman and an active member of a local cricket club. He joined primarily to use their squash courts and, in later life, to play bowls.

He would visit the club several times a week and after a game of squash spend an hour or two in the bar chatting with other members and sharing jokes and stories. Now, whilst he would meet a variety of people, this was yet another bubble and one that had clearly been filtered.

Who were the other members? How had they been filtered?

- First filter: Firstly, this was a local sports club so the members were largely drawn from the local area. As the club was located in Surrey my father was unlikely to hear the views of anyone from the Midlands or the North of England, let alone from Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.

- Second filter: Membership of a sports club would mainly attract people who played sports and were interested in sports.

- Third filter: There was an annual membership fee so you would need a certain income level to be a member.

- Fourth filter: Perhaps the greatest filter was the fact that to join you had to be nominated by two existing members and approved by a membership committee.

It should be no surprise that the membership was largely white, middle-class males.

Should we be worried by filter bubbles?

The newspaper you read and the club you join are just two examples of filter bubbles that predate the internet. So, if filter bubbles are nothing new, should we be worried?

Yes.

Even if you take the view that the filter bubbles created by the likes of Facebook and Google are totally benign and are created solely for our benefit to try to personalise and improve our user experience, I think there is some cause for concern.

Take the example of newspapers again.

If I want to read a newspaper I can go into a shop and choose one. I am aware of the type of content and any political affiliation. I know that The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph or the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail are likely to report on stories differently. It is transparent and it’s my choice. With Facebook and Google, they are making the choice for me and it’s not entirely clear on what basis. Nor do I know what the other options might be.

Take the below examples from a recent missile attack on Syria by the US, UK and France. Even though the Sunday Express and Sunday Mirror use the same photo, it’s obvious from the headlines that they have a different take on the story. And the Sunday Times seems to be looking at the story from a very different perspective.

The good thing is that I can choose which newspaper to buy. A typical shop might stock half a dozen different ones. However, imagine that the newsagent only sells the Daily Express and Daily Mail? That is the equivalent of Facebook only showing certain stories in my news feed or Google only giving certain search results. And whilst I would be aware of a lack of choice when I visited a shop, the same isn’t true with social media or search engines.

I am a creature of habit and the likelihood is that I will choose my regular newspaper. If it was my father it would be the Sunday Express pretty much regardless of the headlines. And this is what Facebook and Google are relying on when they filter and personalise. They are looking at your preferences and choices and extrapolating what you like from your past behaviour. To quote from the same Facebook funded survey:

“The order in which users see stories in the News Feed depends on many factors, including how often the viewer visits Facebook, how much they interact with certain friends, and how often users have clicked on links to certain websites in News Feed in the past.”

But the important difference between the physical world and the world as seen through social media is that one day my father might decide he’s had enough of the Daily Express or perhaps it’s just that a particular story on the front page of the Daily Mirror grabs his attention so he switches. This wouldn’t be possible with Facebook or Google if they had filtered out the Daily Mirror. You can’t choose something that is not there or that you’re not aware of.

Social Media and Search Engines add another level of filtering

Even if social media and search engines only filter at the margins, the important thing is that they add another level of filtering.

They reinforce and amplify our existing preferences and prejudices.

Let’s take the example of my father sitting in the bar of his local cricket club. As we have shown, the people he’ll encounter are heavily filtered.

Imagine that social media or search engines were added to the mix. It would be the equivalent of having a doorman at the entrance to the bar. The doorman would stop people coming in whom my father hadn’t seen for a couple of months or whom he’d seen but not been particularly interested in their conversation (hadn’t liked or shared their stories or jokes with other members).

And whilst my father would most likely be aware of the existence of the doorman and could ask him to go away, the same is not true with search engines and social media.

Conclusion

We all live in filter bubbles.

Some we might actively choose whilst others are just a side effect of the way we live our lives eg the area we live in or where we work.

Filter bubbles are nothing new and not something invented by the internet.

However, as social media and search engines seek to help us make sense of the world and the vast amount of data we are continually exposed to, they add a further level of filtering.

The problem is that we may not be aware that the filtering is happening, it is not clear how it works, and we can’t easily control it.

If the filtering was 100% then it would be obvious. The fact that it is only at the margins, perhaps removing 15% of what we would otherwise see on Facebook, makes it much harder to detect. This is the real danger. You may believe that you are being shown a balanced view of the world but this is not the case. And, of course, it could be much worse with search engines. It’s impossible to know what search results you are not being shown!

Even if we take a wholly positive view, where these global corporations always operate with our best interests at heart, the simple fact is that what we see is being filtered without our consent or control. They are the gatekeepers but they are invisible and largely unaccountable.

If we see the likes of Google or Facebook as less than benign then it could be far worse. They have the power to filter, restrict and control what we see. Or, to use the ‘C’ word, to act as censors. Cambridge Analytica has opened our eyes to the potential for all of us to be manipulated through social media.

Of course, it could be argued that we don’t have to use Google or Facebook or similar. But I think that is being naive. For most people in the industrialised world, social media and search engines have become utilities. They are embedded into our daily lives and are just as vital as having our houses connected to mains water and electricity. We could live off grid, but few of us would choose to do so.

Originally published on www.jsixq.com

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