Eli Pariser on His New Book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. Part 1 of 2

is democracy Now democracynow.org the Warr and peace report I'm Amy Goodman with Juan Gonzalez when you follow your friends on Facebook or Run a search on Google what information comes up and what gets left out that's the subject of a new book by Eli Pariser called the filter bubble what the internet is hiding from you according to Parisa the internet is increasingly becoming an echo chamber in which websites tailor information according to the preferences they detect in each viewer Yahoo news tracks which articles we read zpp registers the type of shoes we wear we prefer

and Netflix stores data on each movie we select the top 50 websites collect an average of 64 bits of personal information each time we visit and then Custom Designs their sites to conform to our perceived preferences while these websites profit from tailoring their advertisements to specific visitors users pay a big price for living in an information bubble outside of their control instead of gaining wide exposure to diverse information were subjected to narrow online filters Eli Pariser is the author of the filter bubble what the internet's hiding from you he's also the board president and former

executive director of the group move on.org Eli joins us in the New York studio right now after a whirlwind tour through the United States welcome Eli thanks for having me up so I this may surprise people two of us sitting here me and Juan if we went online the two of us and put into Google Eli Pariser right we actually might come up with a totally different set of um of find of um a totally different set of links of search results that's right I I was surprised I didn't know that that was uh you

know how it was working until I stumbled across a little uh blog post on Google's blog that said personalized search for everyone and as it turns out for the last several years uh you know there is no standard Google there's no sort of this is the link that is the the best l link uh it's the best link for you and the definition of what the best link for you is is the thing that you're the most likely to click so it's you know it's it's not necessarily what you need to know it's what you

want to know what you're most likely to click but isn't that counter to the original thing that brought so many people to Google that the algorithms that Google had developed really were were reaching out to the best available information that was out there on the web yeah the you know if you look at how they talked about the original Google algorithm they actually talked about it in these explicitly Democratic terms that the web was kind of voting each page was voting on each other page and how how credible it was and this is really a

departure from that this is moving more toward uh you know something where where each person can get very different results based on what they click on when I did this recently with Egypt I had two friends Google Egypt one person gets uh search results that are full of information about the protests there about what's going on politically the other person literally nothing about the protests only sort of uh travel to see the pyramids websites now wait explain that again I mean that is astounding so you go in the uprising is happening in Egypt in fact

today there's a mass protest in taker Square they're protesting the military Council and other issues so if I look and someone who likes to travel look they may not even see a reference to the uprising that's right I mean there was no nothing in the top 10 links and and uh you know what actually the way that people use Google most people use just those top three links so if Google isn't showing you sort of the information that you need to know pretty quickly you you can really miss it uh and this isn't just happening

at Google it's happening all across the web when I started looking into this uh you know it's happening on most major websites and increasingly on news websites so Yahoo news does the exact same thing tailoring what you see on Yahoo news to which articles it thinks you might be interested in and you know what's what's concerning about this is that it's really happening invisibly you know we don't uh see this at work you can't tell how different the internet that you see is from the internet that anyone else sees is uh but it's getting increasingly

different well what about the the uh responses of those who run these search engines that they're merely responding to the uh to the interest and needs of the people who use the system well you know I think they say we're just giving people what we want and I say well what do you mean by what what we want because I think actually all of us want a lot of different things and uh there's a short-term sort of compulsive uh self that clicks on the celebrity gossip and the you know uh more trivial articles and there's

a longer term self that wants to be informed about the world and be a good citizen and those things are intention all the time they're there uh you know we have those two forces inside us and uh the best media helps us sort of it helps the long-term self get an edge a little bit it it it uh you know gives us some information vegetables and some information dessert and uh you get a balanced information diet this is like you're just surrounded by by empty calories by information junk food you like talk about your experience

going on your own Facebook page so this was actually the starting point for looking into this you know phenomenon and basically I after 2008 uh and after I had transitioned out of being the executive director and move on I you know went on this little campaign to meet and befriend people who thought differently for me I really wanted to hear what conservatives were thinking about what they were talking about you know and and learn a few things and so I had added these people as Facebook friends and I logged on one morning and noticed that

they weren't there they had disappeared and it was very mysterious you know where did they go and as it turned out Facebook was tracking my behavior on the site it was looking at every click it was looking at every you know Facebook like and it was saying well Eli you say that you're interested in these people but actually we can tell you're clicking more on the Progressive links than on the conservative links so we're going to edit it out edit these folks out and they disappeared and this gets to some of the danger of this

stuff which is that you know Facebook edited out your friends yeah no I I I I really you know I I miss them and and uh uh your conservative friends my conservative friends the friends that you know that I might and and what the the the play here is is is uh you know there's this thing called confirmation bias which is basically our tendency to feel good about information that confirms what we already believe and you know you can actually see this in the brain people get a little dopamine hit when they're told that they're

right essentially and so you know if you were able to construct an algorithm that uh could show people whatever you wanted and if the only purpose was actually to get people to click more and to view more pages why would you ever show them something that you know makes them feel uncomfortable makes them feel like they may not be right makes them feel like uh there's there's more to the world than our own little narrow ideas and doesn't that in effect uh reinforce polarization within this society and terms of people not being exposed to and

listening to the viewpoints of others that they may disagree with right I mean you know democracy really requires this idea of of discourse of people hearing uh different ideas and responding to them and thinking about them and you know I come back to this famous Daniel Patrick moan quote where where he says uh you know everybody's entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts it's increasingly possible to live in an online World in which you do have your own facts and you Google climate change and you get the climate change links for you

and you know you don't actually get exposed necessarily you don't even know what the alternate arguments are now what about the implications for this as all of these uh uh especially Google Yahoo developed their own news sites what what are the implications in terms of the news that they put out then and the and the news that people receive well this is where it gets even more worrisome because you know when you're just basically trying to get people to click things more and view more pages there's a lot of things that just isn't going to

meet that threshold so you know take uh news about the war in Afghanistan um when you talk to people who run news websites they'll tell you stories about the war in Afghanistan don't perform very well they don't get a lot of clicks people don't uh you know flock to them and yet this is arguably one of the most important issues facing the country we owe it to the people who are there at the very least to understand what's going on on but it'll never make it through uh these filters and especially on Facebook this is

a problem because the the way that information is transmitted on Facebook is with the like button and the like button it has a very particular veilance it's easy to click like on uh you know I just ran a marathon or I baked a really awesome cake it's very hard to click like on uh you know war in Afghanistan enters its sixth year or uh 10th Year sorry uh you know so information that is likable gets transmitted information that's not likable falls out we're talking to Eli Pariser who's written the book the filter bubble with the

Internet is hiding from you now Google knows not only what you're asking to search right they know where you are they know the kind of computer you're using tell us how much information they're Gathering from us well it's a it's really striking I mean even if you're not if you're logged in into Google then Google obviously has access to all of your email all of your documents that you've uploaded a lot of information but even if you're logged out an engineer told me that there are 57 signals that Google Tracks signals is sort of their

word for variables that they look at um everything from your computer's IP address it's basically its address on the internet what kind of laptop you're using or or computer you're using uh what kind of software you're using even things like the font size or uh how long you're hovering over a particular link and they use that to develop a profile of you a sense of what kind of what kind of person is this and then they use that to tailor the information that they show you and this is happening in a whole bunch of places

you know not just sort of the main Google search but also on Google News and and the plan for Google news is that once they sort of perfect this this personalization algorithm that they're going to offer it to other news websites so that all that data can be brought to bear for any given News website that it you know it can tailor itself to you um you know they're really important things that are going to fall out if those algorithms aren't really good and what this raises is a sort of larger problem with how we

tend to think about the internet which is that we tend to think about the internet as this sort of medium where anybody can connect to anyone it's this very Democratic medium it's a free-for-all uh and it's it's so much better than that old Society with the GateKeeper that were controlling the flows of information really that's not how it's panning out and what we're seeing is that a couple big companies are really you know most of the information is flowing through a couple big companies that are acting as the new Gatekeepers these algorithms do the same

thing that the human editors do they just do it much less visibly and with much less accountability and the what are the uh options uh the opt out options if there are any for those uh who use uh uh whether it's Google or Yahoo or Facebook uh their ability to control and keep their personal uh information well uh you know there aren't perfect opt out options because even if you take a new laptop out of the box already it says something about you that you bought a a Mac and not a PC I mean it's

very hard to get entirely out of this there's no way to turn it off uh entirely at Google but certainly you can open a private browsing window that helps uh I think in the long run you know there's sort of two things that need to happen here one is uh you know we need ourselves to understand better what's happening because it's very dangerous when you have these kinds of filters operating and you don't know what they're ruling out that you're not even seeing that's sort of a that's that's where people make bad decisions is you

know what Donald Rumsfeld called the unknown unknowns right uh and this creates a lot of unknown unknowns you don't know how your experience of the world is being edited but uh it you know it's it's also uh a matter of pushing these companies to sort of uh you know these companies say that they want to be be good don't be evil is Google's motto they want to change the world I think we have to push them to sort of live up to their best values as companies uh and incorporate into these algorithms more than just

this very narrow idea of what you know of of what is