Polarizing Filters

In photography, a polarizing filter can manage your reflections and darken your skies: this may be a good metaphor for what happens in media and communications. While filtering and polarization were (and remain) well-known phenomena within traditional media, there are enhanced mechanisms on the Internet, whose effects are still not fully understood.

The term filter bubble was introduced by Eli Pariser around 2010, drawing on earlier work by Nicholas Negroponte and Cass Sunstein, to refer to a phenomenon previously known as echo chamber or information cocoon. If you get all your news from a single partisan source - for example, a single newspaper or TV channel - you could easily get a one-sided view of what is going on in the world. In the USA, the CNN audience doesn't overlap very much with the Fox News audience. Barack Obama is one of many who have expressed concerns about the consequences of this for American democracy.

The concept is easy enough to challenge if you take it too literally.

The images of chambers and bubbles conjures up hermetically sealed spaces where only politically like-minded participants connect and only ideologically orthodox information circulates, but this seems highly improbable. ... We cluster but we do not segregate. Bruns pp 95-96

Or if you imagine that filter bubbles are a technologically determined problem associated exclusively with the Internet. As Ignas Kalpokas notes in his review of Bruns, 

It is easy to slide into a form of fundamentalism, particularly when researching something as pervasive as social media, by simply assuming that the architecture and policies of the dominant platforms determine everything. ... Once we attribute causation to technology, we can comfortably and conveniently avoid responsibility for any societal ills and the ensuing necessity to put some effort towards ameliorating them. Kalpokas

However, the problem identified by Sunstein twenty years ago was not just about filters and fragmentation, but also about group polarization - the fact that there are internal and external forces that push individuals and groups to adopt ever more extreme positions. This is akin to Bateson's notion of schismogenesis. Axel Bruns stresses the importance of this.

The problem, in short, is polarisation, not fragmentation, and such polarisation is not the result of our use of online and social media platforms. Bruns p 105

I agree with his first point, but I want to qualify his second point. While the internet is certainly not the only cause of political polarization, its influence cannot be completely discounted. The techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has identified a specific mechanism on the Internet that appears to have a polarizing effect similar to that predicted by Sunstein - the recommendation algorithms on social media designed to keep users engaged for as long as possible, showing them progressively more outrageous and extreme content if that's what it takes. She argues that this is built into the business model of the tech giants. 

This is consistent with something Des Freedman noted in 2012,

The digital sphere is not a parallel economy but one that accentuates the tensions between the creativity and collaboration of a generative system and the hierarchies and polarisation prioritised by a system that rests, above all else, on the pursuit of profit. Curran Fenton Freedman p 92 my emphasis

In the same volume, Natalie Fenton noted Sunstein's argument that group polarisation is likely to become more extreme with time (p 168).

Many of the comments under Dr Tufekci's CBC interview are from what one might call nudge denialists - people who point out how easy it is to switch off the auto-play function on YouTube, and who claim never to be influenced by recommendations from the tech giants. Yeah, right. But that's not the point. Nobody said you can nudge all of the people all of the time. But the tech giants are certainly capable of nudging some of the people some of the time, at massive scale.

As a former computer programmer herself, Tufekci is able to explain the extraordinary power of the recommendation algorithms deployed by the tech giants. The tech giants choose to develop and use these algorithms in the pursuit of profit; and legislators and regulators around the world may or may not choose to permit or control this. So this deployment is not a matter of technological determinism but is subject to social and political choice. I wonder who is best placed to nudge governments to do the right thing?

 

Update

A few days after I posted the above, further details emerged about Facebook's approach to polarization, including a detailed exposé by @KarenHao (click on her name for Twitter discussion), which in turn appears to have prompted an internal Facebook meeting on Polarization and our Products reported by Ryan Mac and Craig Silverman.

Another Update

John Naughton's latest article has alerted me to a quantitative study of internet usage and polarization, published in 2017, which appears to show that the effects of political polarization are most marked in those demographic groups with comparatively less internet use.

While this evidence provides a warning not to overstate the Internet Causes Polarization thesis, it doesn't fully refute it either. A plausible explanation of these findings is that those who are less familiar with the workings of the Internet may be more vulnerable to its effects. I look forward to seeing further empirical studies.

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Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, Greater Internet use is not associated with faster growth in political polarization among US demographic groups (PNAS, 114/40, 3 October 2017) HT John Naughton, Is online advertising about to crash, just like the property market did in 2008? (The Guardian, 27 March 2021)

Axel Bruns, Are Filter Bubbles Real? (Polity Press, 2019)

James Curran, Natalie Fenton and Des Freedman, Misunderstanding the Internet (1st edition, Routledge 2012). Note that some of this material didn't make it into the 2016 second edition.

Karen Hao, How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation (MIT Technology Review, 11 March 2021)

Ignas Kalpokas, Book Review: Are Filter Bubbles Real? by Axel Bruns (LSE Blogs, 17 January 2020)

Ryan Mac, Facebook: Polarization and Our Products (Twitter, 11 March 2021)

Ryan Mac and Craig Silverman, Facebook is good for America actually, says Facebook executive (Buzzfeed News, 12 March 2021)

Thomas Nagel, Information Cocoons (London Review of Books, 5 July 2001)

Eli Pariser, Did Facebook's big new study kill my filter bubble thesis? (Medium/Backchannel, 7 May 2015)

Cass Sunstein, The Law of Group Polarization (John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics Working Paper No. 91, 1999)

Zeynep Tufekci, YouTube, the Great Radicalizer (New York Times, 10 March 2018). Is YouTube Radicalizing You? (CBC via YouTube, 22 April 2018)

 

Wikipedia: Echo Chamber (Media), Filter Bubble, Schismogenesis,

Related posts: Social Networks and Received Opinion (July 2010), The Pursuit of Truth (December 2016), Polarization (November 2018), Technological Determinism (December 2020), Optimizing for Outrage (March 2021), Bias or Balance (March 2021)

Smart Guns

Just suppose that smart guns were safer than ordinary guns.

For example, if someone grabbed your gun and tried to point it at you. If it was a smart gun you'd be perfectly safe because there is a fool-proof mechanism that prevents its use by an unauthorized person.

As with any technological advance, some people are sceptical. How much do you trust new technology? Suppose the gun doesn't work when you need it. Maybe an electromagnetic pulse (triggered by terrorists or natural solar activity) might take out all weapons in the area. Or maybe the bad guys (or the FBI) can hack into this mechanism and disable your gun before they attack you.

Meanwhile, like many technological advances, there are political implications. In the USA, the key question is whether such a mechanism might help reduce gun violence. Some gun control activists think such a mechanism would be pretty irrelevant.

But that doesn't stop the gun rights activists freaking out at the prospect of any damn technology on their precious weaponry. A shop owner in the US claims to have received death threats from pro-gun lobbyists for offering to sell the weapons. Meanwhile, as Joseph Steinberg suggests, an obsession with smart guns may inhibit other technological innovations that could make guns and gun-owning safer.

The belief here is that once these smart guns are available, by a process of technological determinism, they will become irresistible to legislators. Before long, they fear, you won't be able to buy regular guns.

Obviously that's a cause worth killing for.

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David Kopel, Brady Center lawsuit to use “smart” gun mandate to trigger handgun ban in New Jersey (Washington Post 22 May 2014)

Karen McVeigh, Gun control groups accuse New Jersey of ignoring 'smart gun' law (Guardian 21 May 2014)

Michael S. Rosenwald, Maryland dealer, under pressure from gun-rights activists, drops plan to sell smart gun (Washington Post, 1 May 2014)

Joseph Steinberg, Why You Should Be Concerned About The New 'Smart Guns' (Whether You Love Or Hate Guns) (Forbes 4 May 2014)

Nicholas Tufnell, Smart guns: How smart are they? (BBC News, 23 May 2014)

Eugene Volokh, Smart guns, electromagnetic pulse, and planning for unknown-probability dangers (Washington Post 23 May 2014)


See also Batman/Catwoman: Trail of the Gun (hat tip @ChBrain).

Related post Technological Determism (December 2020)

Ovulation and Sexual Attraction

According to the latest pseudo-science, "wearing red 'boosts attraction' ... experts say that red signals ovulation". [BBC News 28 October 2008]

A previous study showed that "Sexy walks 'keep men off scent' ... those with alluring walks were the furthest away from ovulation ... women disguise their fertility to deter unsuitable partners". [BBC News 8 November 2007]

So if men are attracted to women when they are ovulating, this is because the women are unconsciously broadcasting something; and if men are attracted to women when they are not ovulating, this is because they are unconsciously broadcasting the exact opposite. Got that?

Both pieces of research take female behaviour, as well as male reactions to this behaviour, to be somehow biologically determined. It appears that the researchers expected the sexy walk to coincide with ovulation. But when this hypothesis was disproved they simply reversed the theory, in order to preserve their assumption of biological determinism. That's why I call this stuff pseudo-science.