[Music] [Applause] Mark Zuckerberg a journalist was asking him a question about the newsfeed and the journalist was asking him you know why is this so important and Zuckerberg said a squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interest right now than people dying in Africa and I want to talk about what a web based on that idea of relevance might look like so when I was growing up in a in a really rural area in Maine you know the internet me something very different to me it it meant uh a connection
to the world it meant something that would connect us all together and I was sure that it was going to be great for democracy and for our society but there's this kind of shift in how information is Flowing online and it's invisible and if we don't pay attention to it it could be a real problem so I first noticed this uh in a place I spend a lot of time my Facebook page I'm Progressive politically big surprise but I've always uh you know gone out of my way to meet conservatives I like hearing what they're
thinking about I like seeing what they link to I like learning a thing or two and so I was kind of surprised when I noticed one day that the conserv atives had disappeared from my Facebook feed and uh what it turned out was going on was that Facebook was looking at which links I clicked on and it was noticing that actually I was clicking more on my liberal friends links than on my conservative friends links and without consulting me about it it had edited them out they disappeared so Facebook isn't the only place that's doing
this kind of invisible algorithmic editing of the web Google's doing it too if I search for something and you search for something even right now at the very same time we may get very different search results even if you're logged out one engineer told me there are 57 signals that Google looks at everything from what kind of computer you're on to what kind of browser you're using to where you're located that it uses to personally tailor your query results think about it for a second there is no standard Google anymore and you know the funny
thing about this is that it's hard to see you can't see how different your search results are from anyone else's but uh a couple of weeks ago I asked a bunch of friends to Google Egypt and to send me screenshots of what they got so here's my friend uh Scott's screenshot and here's my friend Daniel's screenshot when you put them side by side you don't even have to read the links to see how different these two pages are but when you do read the links it's really quite remarkable Daniel didn't get anything about the protests
in Egypt at all in his first page of Google results Scott's results were full of them and this was the big story of the day at that time that's how different these results are becoming so it's not just Google and Facebook either you know this is uh something that's sweeping the web there are a whole host of companies that are doing this kind of personaliz Yahoo news the biggest news site on the Internet is now personalized different people get different things Huffington Post the Washington Post New York Times all flirting with personalization in various ways
and where this 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 as Eric Schmid said it'll be very hard for people to watch or cons assum something that has not in some sense been tailored for them so I do think this is a problem and uh I think if you take all of these filters together if you take all of these algorithms you get what I call a filter bubble and your filter bubble is kind
of your own personal unique Universe of information that you live in online and what's in your filter bubble it depends on who you are and it depends on what you do but the thing is that you don't decide what gets in and more importantly you don't actually see what gets edited out so one of the problems with the filter bubble was discovered by some researchers at Netflix and they were looking at the Netflix cues and they noticed something kind of funny that a lot of us probably have noticed which is there are some movies that
just sort of zip right up and out to our houses they enter the queue they just zip right out so Iron Man Zips right out right and Waiting for Superman can wait for a really long time what they discovered was that in our Netflix cues there's kind of this epic struggle going on between our future aspirational selves and our more impulsive present selves you know we all want to be someone who has watched Rashon but right now we want to watch Ace vura for the fourth time so the best editing gives us a bit of
both it gives us a little bit of Justin Bieber and a little bit of Afghanistan it gives us some information vegetables it gives us some information dessert and the challenge with these kind of algorithmic filters these personalized filters is that because they're mainly looking at what you click on first you know you don't it can throw off that balance and instead of a balanced information diet you can end up surrounded by information junk food so what this suggests is actually that we may have the story about the internet wrong in a broadcast Society you know
this is how the founding mythology goes right in a broadcast Society there were these Gatekeepers the editors and they controlled the flows of information and Along Came the internet and it swept them out of the way and it allowed us all of us to connect together and it was awesome but that's not actually what's happening right now what we're seeing is more of a passing of the torch from Human Gatekeepers to algorithmic ones and 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 this is what Ted does right other points of view and the thing is we've actually kind of been here before as a society in 1915 it's not like newspapers uh were sweating a lot about their civic responsibilities then people kind of noticed that
they were doing something really important that in fact you couldn't have a functioning democracy if citizens didn't get a good flow of information that the newspapers were critical because they were acting as the filter and that journalistic ethics developed it wasn't perfect but it got us through the last century and so now we're kind of back in 1915 on the web and we need the new Gatekeepers to encode that kind of responsibility into the code that they're writing you know I know there are a lot of people here from Facebook and from Google Larry and
Sergey who you know people who have helped build the web as it is and I'm grateful for that but we really need to you to make sure that these algorithms have encoded in them a sense of the public life a sense of civic responsibility we need you to make sure that they're transparent enough that we can see what the rules are that determine what gets through our filters and we need you to give us some control so that we can decide what gets through and what doesn't because I think we really need the internet to
be that thing that we all dreamed of it being we need it to connect us all together we need it to introduce us to new ideas and new people and different perspectives and it's not going to do that if it leaves us all isolated in a web of one thank you thank you
