Facebook and Google are putting you in a bubble

Someone on the radio the other day (NPR, perhaps?) pointed out that some groups think that the whole country is going to vote for their favorite presidential candidate while polls show that only about 20% of people are considering them.

Why? Because:

Facebook and Google, in their efforts to show content which they think we would like, show us more of the type of content we interact with. Therefore, they are creating pocket bubble cultures where beliefs are never questioned and reinforced within the group.

This makes people think “The whole world agrees with me! Everyone on Facebook is saying the same thing!”

Not only does this affect what people think most of the world believes, but it makes it more and more difficult to encounter and consider differing viewpoints. This is strongly related to confirmation bias. “Confirmation bias, or Positive Bias is the tendency to look for evidence that confirms a hypothesis, rather than disconfirming evidence.”

Check out this video real quick and see if you can solve the riddle:

 

Google and Facebook take advantage of this, feeding us articles that we read more, like more, share more. They tailor what we see to be more to what we’ll interact with. And we’re more likely to seek out and interact with things which agree with us. And that’s no way to progress, to learn more.

To conclude, here’s a quote from the Veritasium video above, he says:

“The scientific method is to set out to disprove your theory, and when you can’t disprove it, that’s when you know you’re getting to something really true about our reality.”