Identify and Challenge Fake News: The Filter Bubble

Are your news sources diverse? How do you encounter viewpoints different from your own? Can you listen and try to understand the other side?

If the answer is no, you may be in a filter bubble!

What is a Filter Bubble?

• Your own personal, unique universe of information you (probably unknowingly) live in online. And what's in your filter bubble 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 (via Eli Pariser's TED Talk)
• The intellectual isolation that can occur when websites make use of algorithms to selectively assume the information a user would want to see, and then give information to the user according to this assumption (via Techopedia)
• Information network that results from sources using its vats of data to offer us what it thinks we want to see and hear (via Digital Trends)

Safiya Noble is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Studies in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA. In her PDF 2016 talk, Noble explains why we should care about commercial spaces dominating our information landscape.

Search engines have become our most trusted sources of information and arbiters of truth. But can we ever get an unbiased search result? Swedish author and journalist Andreas Ekström argues that such a thing is a philosophical impossibility. In this thoughtful talk, he calls on us to strengthen the bonds between technology and the humanities, and he reminds us that behind every algorithm is a set of personal beliefs that no code can ever completely eradicate.