queer-as-folk-punk

Eternally listening to midwest emo

  • he/they

Queer Adult | POC | Anarchist | Gay Vampire |
They call me a "writer", I guess. Sure.
Multi-Fandom Enjoyer. I have succumbed to the 'tism.
Live fast, die young, punch fascists.
If you see me posting at 2AM when I should be asleep, no you didn't.


shel
@shel

Saying this as a librarian: I think whenever people encounter warnings about social media filter bubbles distorting the world, that everyone who reads it always thinks "that's so true. Everyone else keeps following people on social media who are wrong and believe strange things. Not me though. Everyone I follow is trustworthy, correct, and normal." This is a naïve misunderstanding of the problem.

Filter bubbles create a type of confirmation bias where we perceive those around us as all believing and thinking more in common with us than is really the case. We focus on the things we know we agree on and assume we agree on the rest. There's also an inverse of this where upon learning you disagree with someone on one thing, you conclude you don't agree on anything. Even if you share 99% in common. Social media additionally lets you just remove their perspective from your world. They become an odd assumption, and your sense of what are common beliefs becomes further reinforced, along with the beliefs and worldviews themselves.

Nobody is immune to filter bubbles. It's easy to roll our eyes on advice to "follow people you disagree with" but it's not really even about being open to their ideas. It's just to stay grounded in remembering what parts of your worldview are not universally shared or are even outright rare. That doesn't make your worldview wrong, but I do think it's important to remember if a belief you hold is niche or at least not universal. There are many situations where remembering that not everyone has read The Conquest of Bread is going to seriously change what you think about something else. It's also just good to be able to sit in seeing someone say something you disagree with and not feel like it requires any sort of response emotionally or verbally.

An example I've been using lately was that I encountered someone in a discord server casually say, matter of factly, that dictionaries intentionally exclude works pertaining to adult topics in order to remain "family friendly." To demonstrate, they showed that "dronification" and "edging" weren't in Merriam-Webster, the most descriptivist dictionary of American English. When challenged, the response was that these are "very common and popular kinks."

This reality tunnel, this conclusion, makes logical sense only if you are under the false impression that it's even slightly common to have heard of dronification let alone to have participated in it. The response? Well, we have evidence that left wing British and queer YouTubers HBomberGuy and Abigail Thorne might be into it. Again, most people don't even know who they are, they're also friends, and you'd only notice that "evidence" if you'd already heard of the kink. Following these YouTubers, who are two of my own favorite YouTubers by the way, is a part of the social media filter bubble that sucks you down a particular tunnel of reality. Nobody is immune to this. 99% of people even within American coastal cities with large LGBT populations still can't even begin to conceive of what dronification could possibly refer to. Merriam Webster does not need to censor a word from the dictionary that has never appeared in any major media outlet.

My own personal realization that I was in a distorted filter bubble was when we learned how few people were daily Twitter users. Something like only 1.5% of Twitter users checked Twitter more than once a week, and most people weren't on Twitter at all. We had a distorted sense of Twitter as being this global town square representing the global collective consciousness where important ideas were discussed and organizing happened... because journalists and a few major politicians really like using it. But most people just weren't in that world at all. Everything that happened on Twitter was an unrepresentative sample. It was all always a bubble all along.

One nice thing about Cohost is that, I hope, you are all aware that this website is in no possible way representative of the average person anywhere. It's a rather homogeneous website and everyone on it is some sort of statistical anomaly in terms of their beliefs about themselves and the world.

Most people:

  • Do not have a strong sense of what autism is, besides some sort of developmental disorder
  • Have never heard the phrase "Leftist"
  • Are not in any way LGBTQ identified
  • Have never read a science fiction novel not assigned for school.
  • Don't know what anarchism is
  • Have never played a PC game on Steam
  • Don't know anyone in a polyamorous or non-monogamous relationship

If that surprises you, then you have a filter bubble. That's not a horrible moral failing. Everyone has a social media filter bubble. What's important is being aware that you have one and that it is distorting your view of reality. The way you perceive the world is being shaped and reinforced by the people you surround yourself with and if you change who you are around, even if you do not change any of your fundamental values or major political beliefs, you are going to start seeing the world differently and concluding different things about the world. If you read a different newspaper or watch different YouTube channels, the world around you will be changed.

In library science, we encourage people to try to only use trust authoritative sources to form their opinions on the world. However, consensus reality is starting to break down because of our new media landscape and the proliferation of not just fake news but even just the filtering of what real news you see. Common trust in certain major institutions is eroding and not always for bad reasons either. Authority is constructed and contextual, and the social construction of information authority is breaking down. People don't even trust the Merriam Webster Dictionary anymore, apparently.

If I can't point to the CDC and state clearly that everyone more or less agrees that they're telling the truth about the state of the Pandemic and what we should do if we get sick, then we no longer have consensus on authority and therefore no long have consensus on what constitutes a fact or a reliable source.

Given that that is the case, it is more important now than ever to be aware of how you are shaping your views on the world, where your information comes from, and how social media filters bubbles are changing the way the world appears to you.

Diversify your sources of information. Step outside your bubble for air regularly. Even if you hate what you see, you need to keep yourself from becoming too isolated. Otherwise you will find it harder and harder to connect with others and understand how others see the world; as your own conclusions may become increasingly bizarre while feeling entirely rational. It has happened to me before when I was a Marxist Leninist Twitter addict listening to Proles of the Round Table. It can happen to you and it gets far worse than that.


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in reply to @shel's post:

Yeah which is really frustrating because so many problems could be solved so easily by just reallocating like half of the police and military budgets in any given locale.

But most people disagree with me on this. There isn't the political will for it

Honestly, thank you for that autism example because I have straight up seen people say that autism is destigmatized. My brother in christ, there are people who don't vaccinate their kids against deadly diseases because they think vaccines cause autism...

additionally people often have no good way of thinking about scale, so they don't get that if they only have 500k people in any given group in the US, that's like 0.30% of the US population (i didn't have any other countries memorized)

There’s definitely something to this. Internet “micro cultures” do lead to cognitive distortions, and I often have to combat this by remembering that (for example) my family and coworkers don’t share the same views as (for example) people on Cohost--and even then, my family and coworkers are still a very biased sample.

That said, I have personally tried to stop using the label “filter bubble” to talk about this, because I think it’s misleading about the actual mechanisms at play. This paper https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.2207159119, and the Kurzgesagt video (https://sites.google.com/view/sources-why-we-hate-each-other/) about it go into more detail.

In the media literature, the fundamental mechanism for explaining the impact of new media technology on politics has been selective exposure, captured in notions such as echo chambers or filter bubbles: media technologies are said to polarize by allowing us to isolate ourselves with like minded others, thus avoiding the discomfort of being exposed to views and ideas from other groups…

However, this hypothesis has become increasingly questioned as two empirical findings question the two fundamental assumptions of this mechanism: first, results show that digital media is in fact characterized by substantial interaction across partisan lines; second, such interaction with opposing views has been shown to not necessarily reduce polarization…

Essentially what I don’t like about the “filter bubble” explanation is that it’s usually made along with the claim that algorithmic curation is doing the “bubbling”. Like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube are helpfully protecting me from having to see conservative and fascist propaganda, which… no the fuck they aren’t.

Definitely. I think it’s important to keep in mind that the filtering is (or at least can be) a personal choice, and also that it’s a valid choice. That’s part of why I l prefer the term “micro culture”.

This is probably true for basically anything today. Even at its peak in the 80s, when west-germany only had 3 TV channels, the 8 PM news only reached like 20% of the population (vague guess).

With people my age +/-10, who were told that we were SWEPT away by the wizard boy school books, the novels that presumably have the widest reach for our generation - what's the chance that someone has actually read them (even as audio books, not as movie)? 15%? probably less? And that's for the biggest, most hyped-by-the-publisher work of that time I can think of.

In a way, everything is niche. Everything needs to be introduced from the ground up. Whenever you meet a new person randomly, they have probably never heard of any single thing you do, and you're so lucky if they have.

I was nodding along, going "yeah, my social circles are distorted, i know this" and then ran headfirst into "most people have not played a game on steam" and realized that not just my social circles, but like, the sociality that contains the groups that contain the groups that contain my social circles are distorted

I'm not a capitalist, but I still read The Economist and the Financial Times because I want to know what is going on. I read newspapers like The Globe and Mail, The New York Times, and The Telegraph because knowing what some shithead is saying about me or some other topic I am interested in is useful.

The best thing I ever learnt in university was to not isolate myself to knowledge from outside of the silo I exist within. If I cannot critically read what others are saying, how can I critically understand what is going on around me?

This is part of the reason why I am just not active on social media so much; it's just not useful for me to understand the world.

A really innocuous example of this in my non-internet life was when a very fine musician I know closely connected to the historical informed performance scene was absolutely gobsmacked that not a single one of my friends outside of my music school knew what a viola da gamba is, let alone had even heard of it. And, actually, it was only a few particular nerds in the classical music school who had any inkling or care of what they are.

Meanwhile, historically informed performance is a tiny, tiny subset of classical music, which is a tiny subset of Western music in general... you have to be neck deep in a niche within a niche to have any hope of even encountering violas da gamba.

EDIT: All this to say, the internet is like pouring gasoline on a fire when it comes to filter bubbling, but it's been really insightful to see where and how it happens face to face, which I find to be particularly important for keeping two feet on solid ground.