According to Wikipedia, a filter bubble is an algorithm made by websites to predict what information you want to see based on the users past internet history, and as a result the user only gets certain kinds of information and ads. In previous blog posts I've talked about algorithms and how W. Daniel Hillis describes them in his book "Pattern on the Stone". If you haven't read my last algorithm posts, Hillis describes an algorithm as a "fail-safe procedure guaranteed to achieve a specific goal"(78). A short example would be on page(77-78) where Hillis describes his roommates algorithm for matching socks(lining them up in a row until a pair is found and continue until all socks are paired). So in the internet companies case they would use their algorithm to predict what you would want to buy by using their algorithm. Using myself as an example, I recently starting shopping on Amazon quite a lot and now a lot of my ads on Facebook and other social media sites are for Amazon products.
I did an experiment with a good friend of mine to briefly see if our internet history would be different if we searched the same things. We are not completely different but she is about two years younger than I and we differ on some world views, and also just personal views like TV shows and humor. I first googled some just basic words and phrases in google and then briefly browsed her Facebook and her Youtube. Then I googled the exact same things on my laptop.
Knowing that guns and gun rights are always in the news and social media I decided to just google the word "gun" because why not? On (name changed for privacy) "Kjirsten's" laptop I got pretty generic links for just the word "gun". It was the Wikipedia definition for the word gun and the closest gun shop in our city. Then lower just some generic websites selling guns.
I googled "gun" on my laptop and got the exact same results, same local gun shop and everything.
Getting a little more "adventurous", I googled "gun article" seeing if we'd get the same news stories about guns. This is where things started to differ. Kjirsten's first article was "stop gun violence" and then a couple pretty neutral sites. I asked her about it and she doesn't really have a view pro or against (although when pushed she said she was more against than pro). When I googled the same phrase I got a few sites that were against gun control (I am more pro gun).
I googled the word "gem" as well but didn't get any good results.
I then looked at her Facebook at it was mostly clothing ads or those companies who send you clothing and jewelry every month. Pretty typical of someone her age. My Facebook had a lot of makeup ads and an ad for fragrant beads that I just bought recently. It made sense because my friend does not like makeup while I do, so this ad placement makes a lot of sense based on our personalities and interests.
I looked then at the recommended videos on Youtube and most of Kjirsten's videos were humorous as she likes good clean humor on videos, so it makes sense for her. My Youtube was a lot of art videos, as well as humorous and a few video games. This is just a difference of personality.
The filter bubble in most of these circumstances are not all that bad, it is just recommending stuff that those companies think we would like. With the gun articles comes the problem, the filter bubble would only show stuff that we think of so we wouldn't get much different opinions to challenge our views. If we had an opinion for a reason that wasn't true, the filter bubble would just be cementing that false view.
I got my information on the filter bubble here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble
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