Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Your real life is the bubble
The usual story
The usual story about online filter bubbles goes like this: algorithms give people what they want, or what the algorithms think they want. Only opinions that agree with theirs show up, dissenting views get filtered out, and extreme or toxic opinions start to seem less extreme. The view of the world narrows and becomes more extreme.
What studies found
Studies that looked at what people actually view online, or what search engines show them, found little evidence of ideological isolation. Extreme filter bubbles seem to be rather rare. People online are constantly confronted with opinions and world views that are not their own.
Where the bubble sits
The interactions that fill a person's days, with friends, family, colleagues, and neighbors, are much less diverse than their online bubble. The filter bubble sits in real life.
Online filter bubbles have been the prevailing explanation for why people have hated each other more over the last two decades.
How did the filter bubble idea take off?
Activist Eli Pariser popularized the term in his 2011 book The Filter Bubble, arguing that personalized search results and feeds could wall people off from views they disagree with. The idea caught on because it matched what people noticed in their own customized feeds. Researchers later tested it against real browsing data, and the picture they found was far more mixed than the book's title suggested.
Why are offline circles so similar?
Sociologists call the pattern homophily, the tendency of people to form ties with others who resemble them. A 2001 review by McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook in the Annual Review of Sociology gathered decades of studies showing that friendships and close ties cluster by age, education, race, and religion. Neighborhoods, workplaces, and schools sort people along the same lines before anyone chooses a friend. A person can scroll past a stranger's opposing opinion in a second, while a coworker with a different worldview may never come up in conversation.
How do researchers measure online exposure?
Many studies use browsing logs from large panels of volunteers, which record the sites people actually visit rather than what they say they read. A 2016 study by Flaxman, Goel, and Rao in Public Opinion Quarterly analyzed the browsing histories of about 50,000 American users. They found that social media and search engines were associated with more exposure to opposing views, even though they also found that people's news reading within a given site leaned toward their own side.
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