I have been thinking about how we ended up with the situation in which our online information services feed our personal biases. As an old-timer, I remember the time when we hoped the online world would make us better informed and more aware. I think we thought this was a good thing as we would have a more accurate understanding of the world that surrounds us. We could search or explore and be accurately informed. This was before the claims that we lived within a filter bubble and were likely consuming fake news.
I found Google’s original page rank algorithm appealing. As an academic researcher, I was familiar with the use of citation frequency to service the most influential work. Of course issues bias were identified, but the approach seemed reasonable. Page rank is actually more sophisticated and attempts to weight the importance of the source of the links rather than just counting the number of links. It didn’t take long for this system to be gamed by creating links simply to falsely promote content without actually using the content in any way. The weighting of links based on the importance of the linking pages somewhat mitigated this problem, but even this would be played. Pages of meaningless links connecting to pages of meaningless links limited the value of noting the weighting of the link source. Google we not on to add other signals in an attempt to improve the weighting algorithm.
In my opinion, Google lost its way or gave in when it began to use personal history as a signal. Once you start biasing what you want to see rather than focusing on the quality of the content, the slope of decline accelerates greatly.
Other information sources came later to the game and jumped immediately to biased content. Once the user self-selects information sources (friends), biased content is pretty much assured.
Perhaps the fundamental flaw in the present information system is the conflation of social with information source. Tools such as Twitter and Facebook are used both to socialize and to learn. While it is certainly useful to discuss and debate important sources of information, but this should follow exposure to balanced information sources rather than information sources biased toward one legitimate position of another.
I think the Google News finally has a good idea. Google will provide content based on personal biases, but it also provides selected content delivered to all users. There is value in making this distinction and making the difference clear to users.
