Filter Bubbles - Anderson Conference 2017: Videos and Readings
Beware online "filter bubbles" - Ted Talk by Eli Pariser (9 minutes)
The danger of a single story - Ted Talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (19 minutes)
Saturday Night Live skit - living in a post election bubble (2 minutes)
Filter bubble resources
- Filter Bubbles and the Deep Web: How to Burst Your Filter Bubble!University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign library guide
- The Dangers of Echo Chambers on Campusby Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, Dec. 10, 2016
- Escape Your BubbleA Google Chrome browser extension that adds different news stories to your Facebook feed, based on whether you set it up to "help you better understand" either Republicans or Democrats.
- How to Shake Up Your Echo ChamberAn October 2015 podcast episode from WNYC's "Note To Self" with tips on how to break out of your echo chamber and consume more diverse information sources.
- Burst your bubbleThe Guardian’s weekly guide to conservative articles worth reading to expand your thinking
Fake News
- 5 stunning fake news stories that reached millionsCNN Money, Nov. 2016 (3 minute video)
- Students have struggled with fake news for longer than you thinkPBS News Hour, Dec. 16, 2016
- Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a “post-truth” worldFrom School Library Journal - includes comprehensive set of skills and resources for improving news literacy. Nov. 26, 2016
- From Headline to Photograph, a Fake News Masterpiecefrom New York Times, Jan. 18, 2017
Escape Your Filter Bubble
In her March 3, 2017 article in the New York Times, How to Escape Your Political Bubble for a Clearer View, Amanda Hess offers several ways to escape your own filter bubble.
Here are some excerpts from the article:
Few people get a kick out of acknowledging their own biases, so new digital features are easing the way with candy-colored visuals and interactive quizzes. Download the Chrome extension PolitEcho and watch as it crawls through your Facebook network and visualizes its political bias based on how many of your friends “like” pages dedicated to Breitbart, Marco Rubio, Bernie Sanders or NPR. Then hop over to the PBS website and take a quiz, conceived by the libertarian Charles Murray, that rates your affiliation with “mainstream American culture.”
FlipFeed, a Google Chrome extension created by M.I.T. researchers, provides a voyeuristic thrill: Click a button, and your regular Twitter feed is replaced by that of a random, anonymous user of a different political persuasion.
BuzzFeed is testing a new feature, “Outside Your Bubble,” which pulls in opinions from across the web and gives them a neutral platform.
News sites and personalization
- How the Washington Post used data and natural language processing to get people to read more newsfrom the Knight Lab at Northwestern University, June 2015
- How Social Media is Reshaping the Newsfrom Pew Research Center, Sept. 24, 2014
- How Millennials Get News: Inside the Habits of America’s First Digital Generationreport from the Media Insight Group, March 2015
Social media and the echo chamber
- Video - How Social Media Filter Bubbles Work1.5 minutes video from CNN Money.
- How Facebook Warps Our WorldFrank Bruni, New York Times, May 21, 2016
- Blue feed, red feedTo demonstrate how reality may differ for different Facebook users, The Wall Street Journal created two feeds, one “blue” and the other “red.” See liberal Facebook and conservative Facebook, side by side.
Search engines and confirmation bias
- The digital information bubble exacerbates our bias towards confirming our pre-existing beliefs instead of challenging themfrom The Guardian, May 13, 2014
- Why Students Can't Google Their Way to the TruthEducation Week, Nov. 1, 2016