The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You by Pariser Eli

Author:Pariser, Eli [Pariser, Eli]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: The Penguin Press
Published: 2011-05-11T16:00:00+00:00

The Invisible Campaign

When George W. Bush came out of the 2000 election with far fewer votes than Karl Rove expected, Rove set in motion a series of experiments in microtargeted media in Georgia—looking at a wide range of consumer data (“Do you prefer beer or wine?”) to try to predict voting behavior and identify who was persuadable and who could be easily motivated to get to the polls. Though the findings are still secret, legend has it that the methods Rove discovered were at the heart of the GOP’s successful get-out-the-vote strategy in 2002 and 2004.

On the left, Catalist, a firm staffed by former Amazon engineers, has built a database of hundreds of millions of voter profiles. For a fee, organizing and activist groups (including MoveOn) query it to help determine which doors to knock on and to whom to run ads. And that’s just the start. In a memo for fellow progressives, Mark Steitz, one of the primary Democratic data gurus, recently wrote that “targeting too often returns to a bombing metaphor—dropping message from planes. Yet the best data tools help build relationships based on observed contacts with people. Someone at the door finds out someone is interested in education; we get back to that person and others like him or her with more information. Amazon’s recommendation engine is the direction we need to head.” The trend is clear: We’re moving from swing states to swing people.

Consider this scenario: It’s 2016, and the race is on for the presidency of the United States. Or is it?

It depends on who you are, really. If the data says you vote frequently and that you may have been a swing voter in the past, the race is a maelstrom. You’re besieged with ads, calls, and invitations from friends. If you vote intermittently, you get a lot of encouragement to get out to the polls.

But let’s say you’re more like an average American. You usually vote for candidates from one party. To the data crunchers from the opposing party, you don’t look particularly persuadable. And because you vote in presidential elections pretty regularly, you’re also not a target for “get out the vote” calls from your own. Though you make it to the polls as a matter of civic duty, you’re not that actively interested in politics. You’re more interested in, say, soccer and robots and curing cancer and what’s going on in the town where you live. Your personalized news feeds reflect those interests, not the news from the latest campaign stop.

In a filtered world, with candidates microtargeting the few persuadables, would you know that the campaign was happening at all?

Even if you visit a site that aims to cover the race for a general audience, it’ll be difficult to tell what’s going on. What is the campaign about? There is no general, top-line message, because the candidates aren’t appealing to a general public. Instead, there are a series of message fragments designed to penetrate personalized filters.

Google is preparing for this future.

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