You are not immune to filter bubbles

You are not immune to filter bubbles

July 25 2024

Saying this as a librarian: I think whenever people encounter warnings about social media filter bubbles distorting the world, that everyone who reads it always thinks "that's so true. Everyone else keeps following people on social media who are wrong and believe strange things. Not me though. Everyone I follow is trustworthy, correct, and normal." This is a naïve misunderstanding of the problem.

Filter bubbles create a type of confirmation bias where we perceive those around us as all believing and thinking more in common with us than is really the case. We focus on the things we know we agree on and assume we agree on the rest. There's also an inverse of this where upon learning you disagree with someone on one thing, you conclude you don't agree on anything. Even if you share 99% in common. Social media additionally lets you just remove their perspective from your world. They become an odd assumption, and your sense of what are common beliefs becomes further reinforced, along with the beliefs and worldviews themselves.

Nobody is immune to filter bubbles. It's easy to roll our eyes on advice to "follow people you disagree with" but it's not really even about being open to their ideas. It's just to stay grounded in remembering what parts of your worldview are not universally shared or are even outright rare. That doesn't make your worldview wrong, but I do think it's important to remember if a belief you hold is niche or at least not universal. There are many situations where remembering that not everyone has read The Conquest of Bread is going to seriously change what you think about something else. It's also just good to be able to sit in seeing someone say something you disagree with and not feel like it requires any sort of response emotionally or verbally.

An example I've been using lately was that I encountered someone in a discord server casually say, matter of factly, that dictionaries intentionally exclude works pertaining to adult topics in order to remain "family friendly." To demonstrate, they showed that "dronification" and "edging" weren't in Merriam-Webster, the most descriptivist dictionary of American English. When challenged, the response was that these are "very common and popular kinks."

This reality tunnel, this conclusion, makes logical sense only if you are under the false impression that it's even slightly common to have heard of dronification let alone to have participated in it. The response? Well, we have evidence that left wing British and queer YouTubers HBomberGuy and Abigail Thorne might be into it. Again, most people don't even know who they are, they're also friends, and you'd only notice that "evidence" if you'd already heard of the kink. Following these YouTubers, who are two of my own favorite YouTubers by the way, is a part of the social media filter bubble that sucks you down a particular tunnel of reality. Nobody is immune to this. 99% of people even within American coastal cities with large LGBT populations still can't even begin to conceive of what dronification could possibly refer to. Merriam Webster does not need to censor a word from the dictionary that has never appeared in any major media outlet.

My own personal realization that I was in a distorted filter bubble was when we learned how few people were daily Twitter users. Something like only 1.5% of Twitter users checked Twitter more than once a week, and most people weren't on Twitter at all. We had a distorted sense of Twitter as being this global town square representing the global collective consciousness where important ideas were discussed and organizing happened... because journalists and a few major politicians really like using it. But most people just weren't in that world at all. Everything that happened on Twitter was an unrepresentative sample. It was all always a bubble all along.

One nice thing about Cohost is that, I hope, you are all aware that this website is in no possible way representative of the average person anywhere. It's a rather homogeneous website and everyone on it is some sort of statistical anomaly in terms of their beliefs about themselves and the world.

Most people:

  • Do not have a strong sense of what autism is, besides some sort of developmental disorder
  • Have never heard the phrase "Leftist"
  • Are not in any way LGBTQ identified
  • Have never read a science fiction novel not assigned for school.
  • Don't know what anarchism is
  • Have never played a PC game on Steam
  • Don't know anyone in a polyamorous or non-monogamous relationship

If that surprises you, then you have a filter bubble. That's not a horrible moral failing. Everyone has a social media filter bubble. What's important is being aware that you have one and that it is distorting your view of reality. The way you perceive the world is being shaped and reinforced by the people you surround yourself with and if you change who you are around, even if you do not change any of your fundamental values or major political beliefs, you are going to start seeing the world differently and concluding different things about the world. If you read a different newspaper or watch different YouTube channels, the world around you will be changed.

In library science, we encourage people to try to only use trust authoritative sources to form their opinions on the world. However, consensus reality is starting to break down because of our new media landscape and the proliferation of not just fake news but even just the filtering of what real news you see. Common trust in certain major institutions is eroding and not always for bad reasons either. Authority is constructed and contextual, and the social construction of information authority is breaking down. People don't even trust the Merriam Webster Dictionary anymore, apparently.

If I can't point to the CDC and state clearly that everyone more or less agrees that they're telling the truth about the state of the Pandemic and what we should do if we get sick, then we no longer have consensus on authority and therefore no long have consensus on what constitutes a fact or a reliable source.

Given that that is the case, it is more important now than ever to be aware of how you are shaping your views on the world, where your information comes from, and how social media filters bubbles are changing the way the world appears to you.

Diversify your sources of information. Step outside your bubble for air regularly. Even if you hate what you see, you need to keep yourself from becoming too isolated. Otherwise you will find it harder and harder to connect with others and understand how others see the world; as your own conclusions may become increasingly bizarre while feeling entirely rational. It has happened to me before when I was a Marxist Leninist Twitter addict listening to Proles of the Round Table. It can happen to you and it gets far worse than that.