Video: Personalization Favors Dying Squirrels Over Africa

I found an interesting video on Ted in which the author Eli Pariser (“The Filter Bubble”) talks about the risk of personalization on the Internet. Today search engines or news aggregators from Google to Yahoo, social networks like Facebook or even editorial websites like the New York Times personalize their content based on information they collect from users. Depending on where we live, the users we interact with or what our friends talk about, everyone of us sees different content when looking at the very same website.

Mark Zuckerberg once explained a journalist: “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.”

For Pariser personalization is not necessarily a service, he sees a hidden danger behind it. “It moves us very quickly towards a world where the Internet shows us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see.” This is what Pariser calls a “filter bubble” – a bubble of information tailored and filtered for a specific user (see picture below). But the user himself is not the one who decides what information he sees in his bubble and what information is eliminated, this choice is made by algorithms.

In a broadcast society gatekeepers controlled the flows of information, remembers Pariser. In the Internet age we see the Internet as a free medium, but we actually just moved “from human gatekeepers to algorithmic ones”. The problem is that algorithms don’t have the ethics that human gatekeepers have. According to him, filter bubbles bring our society back into the year 1915.

In my opinion Eli Pariser points out a very interesting and important perspective on what is usually seen as a very positive aspect of the Internet – personalization. Yet, it would be a big challenge to teach algorithms ethics… And it is probably even harder as users to try to find out ourselves, which of the 5 million search results to our queries are really relevant for us.