Facebook, Google Giving Us Information Junk Food, Eli Pariser Warns

LONG BEACH, Calif. -- When it comes to content, Google and Facebook are offering us too much candy, and not enough carrots.

That's according to political activist and former MoveOn.org executive director Eli Pariser, who warned that the "invisible algorithmic editing of the web" via personalized search results, news feeds and other customized content is threatening to limit our exposure to new information and narrow our outlook.

Pariser, who describes his political leanings as "progressive," said at the annual TED conference that he has always made an effort to befriend both liberals and conservatives on Facebook so he could keep track of the issues each group was discussing. Over time, however, something strange happened, Pariser said: his conservative Facebook friends disappeared from his news feed. He realized that Facebook's algorithm had "edited them out" because Pariser was clicking more on links from liberal friends than conservative ones.

Google is also guilty of tweaking what it shows users based on past online behavior. Pariser highlighted how two users can receive drastically different Google search results after querying the same term because the search engine monitors 57 signals to tweak and personalize results. "There is no standard Google anymore," Pariser noted.

"This moves us very quickly toward a world in which the Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see," Pariser said of editing via algorithms.

Because of algorithms that determine what we see online based on our browsing, reading, and clicking history, we risk being exposed to fewer viewpoints and a more limited array of opinions, content sources, and viewpoints, Pariser argued.

"If you take all of these filters together, all of these algorithms you get what I call a filter bubble. Your filter bubble is your own personal unique universe of information that you live in online," he said. "What's in your filter bubble depends on who you are and it depends on what you do you, but the thing is that you don't decide what gets in...and more importantly you don't actually see what gets edited out."

Companies have billed the personalization of information as a way of serving up content that is more relevant to a user's interests. When it rolled out personalized search to all users, Google boasted the feature would "[help] people get better search results." According to The Facebook Effect, Mark Zuckerberg explained the utility of Facebook's "News Feed" by telling his staff, "A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa."

Pariser appealed to tech executives from companies like Facebook and Google present at the TED conference to reconsider their approach in order to create the internet "that we all dreamed of it being"--one introducing us to alternate, novel perspectives that challenge us to think in new ways.

"We really need you to make sure that these algorithms have encoded in them a sense of the public life, a sense of civic responsibility," Pariser said. "The thing is that the algorithms don't yet have the kind of embedded ethics that the editors did. So if algorithms are going to curate the world for us, if they're going to decide what we get to see and what we don't get to see, then we need to make sure that they're not just keyed to relevance. We need to make sure that they also show us things that are uncomfortable or challenging or important."

Smarter, more "concerned" algorithms are necessary to ensure we have a balanced information diet, Pariser said.

"The best editing gives us a bit of both," he said. "It gives us a little bit of Justin Bieber and a little bit of Afghanistan. It gives us some information vegetables and it gives us some information dessert."

Otherwise, he warned, we risk consuming too much "fast food" content.

"Instead of a balanced information information diet, you can end up surrounded by information junk food," Pariser said.

See our full coverage of the 2011 TED conference here.

Comments

[rsaillant1]

08:34 AM on 03/08/2011

Is it my overactive imagination or do the authors of this
story intend for us to see the bacon in the illustration as
Cuba, and the cupcake as the northeastern most tip of
South America, and if so.....why?

[ttowse]

08:01 AM on 03/08/2011

Bush used Martha Stewart to keep us off his scent.
Obama has Charley Sheen.
Same schtick, different face.

Nothing changes. Bait and switch works.
Waiting for change? LOL

[French Toast]

07:38 PM on 03/08/2011

I am asking this in all honesty. What the hell are you talking about?

[ttowse]

09:40 AM on 03/13/2011

In all honesty I don't think you'd understand the concept of scapegoat.

[tosc]

07:26 AM on 03/08/2011

LOLOLOL>>......ALL media is 'serving us junkfood news" It only stands to reason that when a "news show or network" is live 24/7 you are going to have to fabricate and embellish information to fill the enormous venue for what is really behind the scenes....product/service advertising! We don't present news....we present constant biased commentary.

[Fabio Sorano]

01:18 AM on 03/08/2011

the "invisible algorithmic editing of the web" via personalized search results, news feeds and other customized content is threatening to limit our exposure to new information and narrow our outlook.

[jlab]

12:08 AM on 03/08/2011

Hey! All my conservative friends disappear from my Google, as well! I may be partly responsible, since I never made any.

[Hesca419]

05:32 PM on 03/07/2011

"A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa."

This was the saddest thing I've read all day. I guess if we want some people to care we'll have to drag dying Africans to the front of their house. Broken society.

[AvoidFacebook]

04:34 PM on 03/07/2011

This is one of the few reason small business and individual website don't have the chance to attract visitors to their website. With all the news about Facebook being the supreme social networking blog/site everyone thinks this is the norm.

But few of us believe that we owe to Avoid Facebook because it has taken some of our website traffic that should come our way. People spend way too much time on Facebook and learn nothing. All those time wasted on Facebook means no visitor traffic coming our way.

For all of us who are concerned about Facebook issues we have created the website called Avoid Facebook @ www.AvoidFacebook.com

[kerriberri]

04:12 PM on 03/07/2011

Valid points.

I'm also very troubled by the weighting sites receive--corporate sites rank higher than individual/informally produced ones, & (my suspicion) that proprietary programmed custom sites (that only large corporations can afford) get higher rankings than those created with, say, WordPress. Also that multiple contributors lead to higher rankings than un-cited postings, newer content more than older, more established content, etc. Lots of whimsical rules based on a computer algorhithm rather than human-edited content and ranking based on the quality of the site and the info it contains.

Not to mention junk returns from content farms!

The internet's new direction reminds me a little too much of Orwell's vision of revisionistic history. We've given an incredible amount of control over what we can/will see to a few search engines and a very small body of software engineers. And it's getting even smaller as people are ceding their internet experience to Facebook, sticking with the familiar and mundane.

It's quite a problem with no easy solutions. I'm sad to see so many really valuable alternative health sites being bought out by insurance companies, watered down, and useful information actually disappearing or just being drowned in all the noise.

Perhaps someone in academia will ride to the rescue & resuscitate the dream of a truly free & interconnected web. We can hope, can't we? And in the meantime, use Dogpile!

[AlexanderFurnas]

03:27 PM on 03/07/2011

There is nothing new in this analysis. It is essentially Cass Sunstein's argument about information cocoons. I am glad Pariser is highlighting the issue, and it is good for people to keep thinking about the danger here. But its not a novel point.

[methodman]

03:26 PM on 03/07/2011

This is a great conversation. Schools need to force more archiving studies and projects on their students. For example I had a large album collection. I subscribe to Rhapsody. I could listen to my albums on it. I also own a stack of 15 year old keyboard magazines with less popular artists. Many of whom no one remembers They also are on Rhapsody. The problem is twofold. cataloging is important to a high quality diversified life. People who don't catalog are far more limited in their exposure to things. What to do? Go to your local school board meetings throw these ideas out and blog about them. Every week xerox off one of the vocabulary lists in the Encyclopedia MacroPropedia v 29 ;peek through to find the object words of conversation and substitute those objects into the conversation.

[frankenmouse]

02:36 PM on 03/07/2011

To be fair to both of these services, there are ways of turning these algorithms off/opting out. Yes, they are a bit difficult to get to, but it is possible. I think the bottom line is that some people are more interested in a wider world view and some aren't. The selection bias has always existed and new technologies won't change people's behaviors all that much, you'll still have the two camps.

[wilray]

02:35 PM on 03/07/2011

So instead of an algorithm that delivers things that I want to see, Eli wants an algorithm of things that someone thinks I should see. No Thanks. Besides who gets to decide what I should see. In the past my search for hot, heavenly bodies delivers up the scantily clad. Now because someone else thinks I should know more about astronomy, I'll get results for the sun and other stars. My search for porn will lead me to fundamentalist church sites raging against porn.

Of course, they could have Google deliver unfiltered searches - like the chaos that existed before we had Google. The unfiltered internet is like the untempered schism. Nobody is meant to see that.

[slowuncle]

02:38 PM on 03/07/2011

there are many different types of porn
Fox News, for example

[wilray]

03:15 PM on 03/07/2011

fanned and faved.

[ClarcKing]

02:34 PM on 03/07/2011

Mr. Pariser, It is an excellent criticism, that should have been obvious years ago. Research suffers as the search for education, truth, facts and perspective is constrained by political, economic and social considerations or agendas. Furthering the cause of dumbing down the population.

[Andrew Wojtkowski]

02:57 PM on 03/07/2011

While you're correct that each of these things are happening, the line between them is faded at best. The sky is blue and I like Cheez-Its. Both true statements, but if the sky were green, would I eat Triscits? Heck no. Ugh.

In all seriousness, in the past when you wanted to search for education, truth, and facts, you had to go far. You had to go to the library, pick up a book, and actually read it. The same holds true now. In fact, with the internet (especially youtube) you can even learn how to plumb your entire house in a matter of hours!

As the internet grows, the actually correct content is lost in a mire of outright atrocities. For every Youtube video that tells you how to do something properly, there's likely 10 that are not. They are filtered by a rating system, and ultimately because of that, the correct method USUALLY ends up on top. No system is perfect.

The problem truly lies within our acceptance of that first video as fact before checking the others. It's outright laziness, but on top of laziness is actually arrogance.

The internet has given us access to a lot of useful information, but it has given us a lot of really bad information. It is up to us to decide that. Not Google, not Facebook, and if we let political agendas get in our way, it's nobody's fault but our own.

[ClarcKing]

03:57 PM on 03/07/2011

Your assessment has merit, however the Internet is governed by the Too Big Search Engines that not so subtly dominate and oppress. Domestic and World News, Finance, Law, Medicine, Environmentalism, Politics are under tremendous pressure to deliver one substandard product. which is why the world financial / economic system is in disintegration. We have a knowledge deficit crisis that creates a mysterious entropic inability to create the higher order of existence humanity demands.

[joeyc]

02:34 PM on 03/07/2011

I think it's unethical to modify search result content based on user profiles. Amazon is guilty of similarly squirrely behavior--modifying prices based on the user--and targeted advertising based on tracking cookies is widespread; but search engines are designed to find information and I don't take kindly to the idea that my search results are based on profiling scripts. As for Facebook, I wouldn't touch that with a 10 foot pole.

[Andrew Wojtkowski]

03:00 PM on 03/07/2011

You'd be surprised at what life would be like without those profiling scripts. If it were truly random, I could make a website that reads:

MY PERSONAL AGENDA

Obama, socialist, squirrels, pepsi, frogs, etc etc etc.

I'm sure you've seen these sites. Google is a free service. If you want a company to go in there and hand-pick good websites from bad, and give you a random result within that, then you're going to have to pay for it.

[joeyc]

03:23 PM on 03/07/2011

I'm not any sort of expert in this area, but you can still employ general "relevance" filtering without making it user-specific. I don't see any justification for tying customized search result content to specific users unless it is offered as an additional option, since it could be useful for someone doing very specialized research, although there are subscription-based search engines that would be a much better option.

Regarding Google being a "free service," there are many forms of advertising that Google could use, even targeted banner ads, etc. that could be used to generate ad revenue. Now that you mention it, it seems that Google intentionally avoids more obvious advertising in favor of this much more insidious and unethical form of content-based advertising. I always thought it was odd how "clean" Google's page layout appears.