Russian-Funded Ads Behind the Election

Both Facebook and Google have found the evidence of Russia-funded ad spread in the internet. As Facebook announced, lots of accounts that are related Russia spent totally of 100,000 on campaign ads. Google says it founds evidence as well, that Russian operatives spends thousands of dollars on politically divisive advertisements. According to Will Oremus, it’s a big deal. However, from my view, I agree with that it’s significant because it violates the election law and affect the election, but it does not violates the constitution which guarantees the freedom of speech. Since the content of these ads are unrevealed, but it’s described as “amplification of “divisive messages” on issues such as immigration, race and gay rights”. From my perspective, people who wants to persuade others would use amplification as a tool. It is a common strategy to enhance candidate’s support from people. If Russia is not behind these ads, and these ads are posted by American companies, I don’t think these amplifications would cause lots of attention after the election. The States has two parties which lead to different ideas and opinions on different issue. It is the foundation of this country, so what is the problem that people have opposite perspectives on a certain issue.

The trouble from these ads, I personally think is mostly from “fake or discredited content from phony social media accounts posing as US or European citizens”. In the beginning of the school year, we learned the idea of filter bubble. Here, I think these fake news appears another sort of bubble on the internet. People have to learn the ability to distinguish right and wrong, since the information posted online are always mixed with true and false messages. People should not judge the truth of an information base on personal preference. Meanwhile, we need companies to set up regulations on the credibility  of information online.

Image source: http://wvik.org/post/davenport-library-host-rise-fake-news#stream/0

The Biased Internet

Born in a free country, everybody here in USA gets an equal opportunity as the person to your left or right, front or back, no matter the prejudices of caste, creed, class, color, sex, or race. But less and less people are using that to their advantages, mainly teenagers, and are losing interest in politics because the ideals of the political party don’t match up with their own individual ideals; they just blindly believing their parents on the issues and take a stance with them without giving a thought of their own. The Internet also plays a huge part in this since, when the teenagers do think and try to debate on the issues they feel aren’t right, most of their point and argument comes from nowhere else but online, a place where anybody could say anything and it could become the new trend of the year. A staggering 88% of American teenagers between the ages of 13 to 17 have an access to a mobile phone of some kind and with 23% of teens who now own a tablet too, more than 90% of the teenagers have stated that they go online at least once a day. With these many users online, we run into a place bias known as “filter bubble.” What’s more is that this number will keep on going higher as new technologies are being released. Since, the internet is surely the fastest and the most efficient way to find any news in almost no time, it could easily deviate us from our thinking of the point to something else.

The Internet that is supposed to connect us to the world, improve the democracy by helping people find the people with same thought-mentality, or let us share our views about something wholly new, it is the very thing that’s blocking our ways and is giving us personalized feeds of our social media accounts which at time is just the thing you want, things at the reach of just one key stroke, but at times this could just be the thing we don’t want to see. When the internet curates the informations that reaches to our eyes, a “filter bubble” is created; an expression brought up by a TED-talker: Eli Pariser. He refers to this bubble as if this is something we live in and is blocking our views to the outside world. Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Youtube, Twitter and Netflix are some of the few curators of the “personalized” feeds that provides us with informations “it think we want to see but not necessarily what we need to see.” (Eli Pariser) Companies like these uses a combination of complex algorithm to customize the feed page according to the individual’s interest and curates what gets in and whats get edited out. The result is a crunched up summarization of the all the informations we shouldn’t be getting. For example: if you support the Republicans and watch a lot of its video on Youtube, there are high chance that Youtube will filter out the other side of the political spectrum.

Even though, there will always be one video from outside the “filter bubble,” people tend not to choose it because they know it doesn’t matches up to their expectations, ideals, and thinking, therefore, resisting the urge to go out of their comfort zone. To quote Eli Pariser, there is always existing “struggle going on between our aspirational self and our more impulsive present.” (Eli Pariser) We want to watch the new bill release from the Democratic side but we feel more relatable to the Republican side of it. Hence, as a Democratic country, we should press our citizens to follow both sides of the spectrum, no matter in what categories, to level the ground so that we have a fair and an unbiased understanding and thinking towards the topic than being on one side of the see-saw!

The Confirmation Bubble

One of the things that has been discussed in our Government class is the concept of the “Filter Bubble”, the algorithm(s) search engines and social media outlets implement and how it can lead to more and more to what’s been referred to as a “confirmation bias” – the rejection of facts simply because they’re incongruous with someone’s current beliefs about a subject. This “bubble” isn’t an actual bubble but more an algorithm that sites like google Twitter, Facebook, and so on have adopted to present things to us that we may find more interesting or engaging. Many reading that would think that it doesn’t sound that bad; it actually surprisingly is, for the people subject to it and the content creators alike. While this algorithm does tailor your search results and recommended things to look at, it doesn’t take into account anything other than what it thinks you may really want to look at. The problem with this is that, while it shows you things it thinks you want to see, it doesn’t show you what you should actually be paying attention to, which can lead to views about subjects being so ignorance based that – when faced with an opposing view – someone may either wonder why they have never heard of what’s being shown to them or completely reject it.

This “confirmation bias” and how the filter bubble effects it can lead to a more unwavering viewpoint than what’s actually necessary for a subject because of the fact that you’re only being shown what you want to see, even though what you want to see isn’t always the right way to look at it. “Once we have formed a view, we embrace information that confirms that view while ignoring, or rejecting, information that casts doubt on it” – psychology today. The simple act of showing us more and more of what we want to see, and subsequently believe in, can lead to more and more of a bias towards a subject and can, eventually, lead to total rejection of anything that challenges that belief.

The filter bubble also harms content creators that focus on a viewpoint that is different from the norm. Recently YouTube has had a change to its general algorithms and policies towards certain kinds of content because of advertisers dropping out of the site. Their reasoning? Appearing next to hate speech or extremist views. While it’s understandable that giant companies like Starbucks and the like would not want to be seen in tandem to things such as extremism and hate speech, this does not justify the way google has handled the issue. In addition to demonetizing those extremist and hate speech videos, which in of itself is effectively censorship for those who live off their ad revenue for YouTube, they have been demonetizing videos that don’t even resemble extremism or hate speech and simply address controversial topics. Through this, google has been effectively creating an inwardly spiked filter bubble – for its own site – which is harming itself as well as those inside it. This filter bubble, holding all the tiny little balloons which are the YouTube community, have been either deflating or outright popping the little balloons inside it through their own policies. Because of this “adpocalypse”, many creators are having an extremely hard time maintaining their rate of creation for their content.

 

The Filter Bubble: A Threat To American Democracy

The Filter Bubble prevents American citizens from completing their civic duties, and prevents the nation from progressing into the future. A filter bubble is the term used to describe the way in which companies, such as search engines or media outlets, tailor the information provided to each individual user in order to make their experience more enjoyable. Catering to every person may appear, at first, to be convenient, but some very serious issues arise. People become uninformed about different perspectives regarding both domestic and international issues. They lose the ability to understand the way in which the other side is thinking. In our democracy it is each citizen’s responsibility to stay informed so that they can make the right decisions for our nation.

    If people are unable to see major issues facing their community, how can they possibly make a decision that will solve it? People need to know where their community, and our nation, should be focused. Some issues are more pressing than others, and in order to dictate which ones should be solved first all of them need to be understood. The way in which the problem is solved is also changed by the filter bubble. Both sides will present solutions, but if they are not working together a compromise will never be met ultimately leaving the problem unsolved. There are several issues today that provide examples of this. Currently our nation is debating over a government-funded healthcare system. Neither side is willing to hear the others perspective. A lot of talking is happening, but no one seems to be saying anything beneficial. If both sides understood each other and worked together a compromise would occur much faster.

    The Filter Bubble is polarizing this nation’s political parties creating a massive rift in the population. History has shown us time and time again that having two extremely different radical viewpoints leads to disaster. In Weimar Germany the communist left and the conservative NSDAP party fought, in some cases to the death, over who should control the government. Power struggles  occur and one side ends up being oppressed just like in Weimar Germany.  When the conservatives seized power being a member of the left party became illegal with punishments as severe as death. Major rifts lead to internal conflict and the potential demise of our way of life completely. Regardless of how strong our government is we could succumb to the same fate. For the sake of our democracy we need to realize they don’t have to agree solely with one side. They are allowed to agree with differing parties on different issues.Very few fall into just conservative or liberal and neither side objectively better than the other.

    The ability of the people to thoroughly understand certain situations is impaired by the filter bubble. Citizens only see the good aspects of the political party they align themselves with. Without recognizing the faults of their campaigns/candidates there is no way to improve. If they only see the victories they will be shocked when they lose an election. In our most recent presidential election most democrats didn’t believe the republican candidate would win because they only heard negative things about him and only heard the positive aspects of their candidate. Many people were outraged by the loss, and it may have caused some to lose faith in democracy completely. When people lose faith in voting they stop doing it, causing the collapse of democracy completely.

    In order to maintain our government and way of life, it is essential that we rid ourselves of the filter bubble. We need to stay informed on global and local issues, even those that don’t interest us as much, so we can make the right decisions. Most importantly we need to be able to understand and accept the other side’s argument, and realize that we don’t have to just fall on one end of the political spectrum.

    

Our Responsibility as Citizens: Popping the Filter Bubble

The filter bubble prevents Americans from fulfilling our responsibilities as engaged citizens. Furthermore, only showing the public what they want to see blinds them to opposing viewpoints, thus limiting their exposure to knowledge. But choosing to expand your perspective beyond your personalized filter bubble will remove this issue and create a country of aware, involved citizens. This act of choosing is known as political efficacy, or a citizen’s ability to understand and influence political affairs. A citizen’s ability and willingness to promote change allows them to engage in all other civic responsibilities, including voting, grassroots mobilization, and cultural change.

The effects of political efficacy in the voting process are enormous. If citizens research and understand the viewpoints of all candidates -from the president down to every representative in city hall- they will know who they are voting for, rather than just straight-ticket voting. While straight-ticket voting may be the best option for some voters, the Pew Research Center’s Political Typology quiz reveals that few members of a political party agree with 100% of their party’s views. Because of this, straight-ticket voting can leave people in office who you would not have voted for if you had been aware of their political views and moral ideals. But choosing to expand your perspective by acknowledging the filter bubble allows citizens to reflect on opinions from all candidates, despite their party affiliation.

Grassroots mobilization is also heavily influenced by a citizen’s efficacy. Grassroots mobilization describes a group of like-minded individuals coming together to make a difference, whether it be economic, social, political, and environmental change. Positive change in a community can only begin when citizens become informed from going out of their way to discover current societal issues. By knowing the problems, citizens can form intellectual opinions, which, upon criticism, can be supported by logic.

Cultural change is a political pathway in which change occurs gradually over time. For example, the legalization of gay marriage has been a public issue for many years. But through lobbying and peaceful protests, those in favor of gay marriage changed the opinions of critics over time. For topics like this, producing positive change can take many years, and therefore requires dedicated and patient citizens to stand for their cause. If the filter bubble prevents us from shedding light on a current issue, it would be impossible to address the matter in the first place.

It is easy for American citizens to overlook the power of civic participation by insisting that just one person doesn’t make a significant difference. But political efficacy allows us to acknowledge the pros and cons of our country. Here, we must be able to recognize where improvements can be made and then improve upon them. We must also acknowledge and utilize the liberties we have, like voting for example. With political efficacy, citizens will be able to vote intellectually, produce positive change in their community, and cause cultural shifts over time. Contrary to the belief that citizen involvement doesn’t make a difference, it is the most effective method of improving our country from the ground up. 

 

Burning the Bubble

Over the past few months two hurricanes have hit our country. Hurricane Harvey pouring it’s wrath onto Houston and the surrounding areas, and then Hurricane Irma hitting florida leaving millions of people without power and stranded because of flooded homes. The storms had devastating effects on our country and it seemed that they were the only topics that the news media would cover. People all across the country knew about the devastation in the south but knew very little about what was happening in the northern parts of our country. While the south was flooding the north was, and still is, burning. Although many lives may be in danger due to poor air quality, low visibility, and homes may be in the way of the fires there has been very little news coverage over the fires and I believe that the reason for the low coverage can be brought back to the filter bubble. The filter bubble sorts out information and products that it believes is not useful or does not apply to it’s user, it essentially puts its user into there own little box in which they only hear information that they agree with. And in relation to the fires the general public is not interested in parts of the U.S. that have low population and that doesn’t affect themselves. This way of thinking could be the downfall of the U.S. because the population only hears what they want to hear and not necessarily what they need to hear. Large corporations will buy the consumer’s information so that they can make products and sponsor ads that are tailor made for the people who fit in their own boxes and unfortunately for Montana, a state being greatly affected by the fires, it is difficult for the general public to be informed and know if they need help it can be difficult for people to find help without public support. Montana even declared a state of emergency to get help from the government to control the fires. I stress the point of the fires to exemplify how a poorly informed public can have consequences. Now that we now know the problem we must ask ourselves how can we fix it? This starts with popping the filter bubble that controls what we see on the internet. Corporations that feed consumers more of what they want and what they have already seen could change their format and supply consumers with important happenings in the world local, abroad, and what they would likely click on. We could give control back to the consumer and make greater connections to the world wide web, people could be informed and know about happenings all the way round the world. All it takes is knowledge and awareness of what is keeping society Ill informed in order to make a big difference in how the public views the internet.

Is filter bubble the real problem

“Filter bubble” or “Self-satisfy bubble”

Recently, we watched Eli Parser’s TED talk about something he’d like to call the “filter bubble” in class. His aim was the irrationality of the existence of filter bubble on almost every social medias and searching engines (for example Google and Facebook). The automatic personalization of search and related technologies brings up the fact that users will only able to see those informations that supported their general viewpoints and rarely obtain any informations or ideas that contradicted theirs. After a while, users of these apps become isolated in their own cultural or ideological bubbles. Admittedly, the existence of the filter bubble might be real, but Eli Parser’s claim that indicates the “filter Bubble” the arch-criminal that narrows people’s mind is just different from the truth.

Google gives us different result though searching the same thing

 

There is a phenomenon similar to the “filter bubble” named “confirmation bias” reminded us by  Alexander Zwissler. This noun basically suggest that it is every human’s nature to seek those informations that confirms opinions we already believe to be true but dismissing any information that contradicts these “devotional” beliefs. Every human being tend to do so. With this tendency, one choose only those websites that please him while surfing on internet, make only the friends that shares the same idea as him, and go only the place that packed with the people on his side. These actions is also called the Self-selected personalization, in another word one choose how he want to think of his world. For example, a person who opposes immigration might want to avoid information that specifies how much a country has gained due to immigration, while paying a lot of attention to news stories about problems related to immigration.

The existence of filter bubble is actually based on the information that you are constantly searching. If you are the kind of people that are able to avoid this “potential confirmation bias” and listen, watch, talk about various sorts of things, the knowledge you obtain will be diversiform, and the search engine will not narrow your search result if you click at the websites that have entirely different idea. While admitting the existence of the “filter bubble”, Pre-selected personalization, we cannot ignore the fact about this “confirmation bias” as the self-selected personalization. Filter bubble might only exist on social media and searching engine. but the self-selected personalization exist in every human’s mind, and causing the filter bubble to reach the maximum disadvantage for them. You could say that filter bubble is removing and narrowing the information, but those are the information that people want to see, no matter if there is or is not a filter bubble, people will always tend to click on those website. In this way, filter bubble is not the thing that we should concern about, it can be consider as a program that is developed by people themselves. Even if you completely delete this program, there will always be new program coming out, with problem. If you can’t get rid of the true issue from the “programmer”, you will never get a good and clean program.

We only see those that favor our beliefs

 

To sum up, the existence of filter bubble is proved to be true by many experiments. Nonetheless, that shouldn’t be the problem to concern if we want to solve the problem of getting single sided information. One can only be clear when he step outside of his own bubble, look at every thing from the each sides with all sorts of information obtained. What we should avoid isn’t the little program called “filter bubble”, but the “Self-satisfy bubble” that created by the programer, ourself.

 

If You Don’t Know, We create Our Own Filter Bubble

According to Eli Pariser, nowadays the Internet has formed a filter bubble for us, which blocks us from receiving information that contains various perspectives. Nevertheless, I have a different opinion than Pariser, I think we make the filter bubble by ourself.

Praiser gives an example that he assigns two of his friends to type the same keyword in google, yet these two people get different results from each other. He suggests that the search engine automatically eliminates some information, in other word, it controls the flow of the information. Praiser mentions his concern on people only getting the information that they would agree upon. However, from my point of view, the search engine is just doing its job right. In order to call it a “smart search engine”, we would expect the search engine to provide information that we are interested in.

 

Among the thousands of researches we have done, we always choose the ones that either best interest us or ones we consider as the most useful; therefore, slowly our own laptop learns and memorizes our interests. Because the purpose of a “smart” search engine is to serve the user better, the Internet will edit out some information automatically based on the last research we have done. If we change to a brand new laptop, I believe the links pop up would be the ones get visited most often from the other users. Just like this, when we are looking up something that we know nothing about, we can always began with the information that the majority of people would consider helpful.

Moreover, instead of blaming the Internet for controlling the flow of information, we could have change they way we pose the keywords. Certainly I state that the search engine is smart, yet the keywords we put in the search bar also affect the results we get. I remember Dr. O provided an example that the supporters for Hillary Clinton thought she could win because of the information they saw were mostly tend to her side. But couldn’t those supporters spend some time to do research on both sides? From my perspective, supporters for Hillary Clinton would want to learn more news about how she won more popularity, which leads them purposely to ignore news about Donald Trump—or if they see news that praises Trump, they may choose to block that website or shake their heads thinking that was fake news. Gradually, the Internet would only show news these supporters would like to see, and no wonder they feel surprised when the final result of election came out.

In all, I believe the Internet does not control the flow of information; instead, we created out own bubble—information is always there, the Internet is just trying to serve us better, makes it easier for us to find out the information we tend to look at. According example in the lecture that because Praiser tend to click on the links shared by his liberal friends on Facebook more often, slowly Facebook eliminates the links shared by his conservative friends, I personally indicate that Praiser could have go in to his conservative friends’ page and then read those links if he really wish to—the information does not go away, it is Praiser’s frequent choices on liberal links lead to the disappearance of the other links. Therefore, I believe every person has a different filter bubble created on their own, and there is no reason for us to blame the Internet when we make our own choices on what too see what to not see.

Image from Medium

Life in the Bubble- How the Filter Bubble influences thinking

Throughout history, man has sought to find others with likemindedness. With the growth of technology and powerful companies such as Google and Amazon, this search for likemindedness has evolved into what is known as the “Filter Bubble”. The filter bubble is coined by internet activist Eli Pariser in his book “The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding  from You”.

The structure of business on the Internet is free of charge, and a person gives his personal information to an Internet company in exchange for its service. By knowing people’s interests, the filter bubble begins its influence on people. As a result of a personalized web account on the internet, the Filter Bubble creates an absolute disadvantage to human technology and a world view. First of all, I don’t think peoplewould like others knowing about their personal information, especially strangers. In this way, putting your personal information while you register for an account is actually disclosing your privacy. Most recently, Experian suffered a security breach when millions of people had their private information exposed, which to me is one of the results of the Filter Bubble.

A second disadvantage of the Filter Bubble is that it creates a limitation of view. By separating people from the news they are not interested in, people will not gain enough information about the world. For example, if a Republican can only see people with the same viewpoint, he cannot have enough information about a Democrat way of thinking on the other side. Therefore, most people may not know the issues in an election and they will not be able to carry out their responsibilities as a citizen of the United States. Technology has provided many benefits, but has also created the potential for people to isolate their thinking, with sometimes surprising results, such as the election of Donald Trump. Furthermore, the Filter Bubble actually reduces people’s creativities because they are not able to see all sorts of views and technology when they are imprisoned by their interests. 

From my perspective, China itself is a Filter Bubble. If I would have any chance to put atag about China, it would be “isolation”. The most recent new I heard about China in the US is  that missiles have been launched from North Korea. However, I did not read any news about it when I logged into my Chinese social media. I found an article about China blocking the news of missile launching written by Neil Conner, which perfectly represents the Filter Bubble. The political cartoon by Paresh Nath shown above portrays China as sleeping and not being aware of the danger of the North Korea Nuclear Program, this supports my view that China isolates itself from troubles in other parts of the world, even a country as near as North Korea.

In general, I don’t think we can completely avoid Filter Bubble in our daily life, but we can reduce Filter Bubble as much as possible such as searching for informations not from social media but on the newspaper. In this way, we can take advantage to improve our country as an american citizen.

The Traps of Filter Bubbles

According to Eli Praiser’s Filter Bubble theory, the social medias itselves selects the categories of information on the internet for the viewers, and create an environment on what the viewers more interested in. However, Eli does not agree with the these personalising on the internet, since the internet only gives what it thinks we want to see, but not necessary what we need to see. I agree with this point of view.
Internet is a way for people to explore and find out the information all over the world. This ability gives people different points of view from all around the world, which put different contexts into the discussion. During this process, it helps people to have more and more details about the informations, and can reach the news with more comprehensive opinions. The environment with the conflict between opinions can help to develop the insight of the problems, which help to create more suggestions that helps to solve, or say, balance, the social problems we are now facing, such as conflict between politics and different foreign policy. However, when the internet closes down the options for us, we got only the information that we view more, and we can not realize it, since we can not tell what actually changed in the web. Although we are still viewing the same social medias, what we are viewing changed already, and this can cause a large problem. For example, a viewer is usually in the middle between democrats and republicans, he views balancedly between the information and news between these two groups. However, one day he found a really interesting democratic article, so he used a lot of time on reading it, and opened several more pages about the article. Then the internet records that he used more time on democrats than on republican that day, so they change his viewing information to more democratic information. In the end, this viewer becomes a democratic because the change in content of what he is viewing by the internet. This example shows that the internet-create filter bubbles are not available for people, since a lot of people who have neutral opinion can be lead to one side of the opinion.
On the other hand, the filter bubble created by internet can influence people’s life by blocking them from what they are not agree with. Imagine there is only a web page that contains all the opinions and comments that the viewer agrees to, the viewer can not know what others opinions are, then, within an environment with just agreements, the viewer can become more and more close to oneself’s opinion, and become aggressive towards other kinds of opinion that are not in the same route with the viewer. This can be a huge problem for online discussions, that it may become quarrels because people would not accept other opinions.
Finally, Eli raised a great opinion that internet helps to build democracy. However, I do not think the personalized website should be apart of it; In fact, it is the opposite of democracy. People got “blocked” from the information they actually need, instead, they got what they are “interested” in, but in the end, nothing necessary. In this way, people actually can not connect themselves to the world.
What people need are not design-for-one-only web page, they need to know all the information to have comparison, which makes it more easier to view the world and build self opinions. The filter bubbles are not helping people in viewing internet, since people can not get informations when they actually want to see things with details. Internet can never predict what a viewer really want to view, because occasion happens, and then people start to getting things from the filter bubbles from internet. People should have their own filter bubbles, created one will never meet the requirements of changing opinions of people surfing on internet.