The Problem of Filter Bubbles Hasn’t Gone Away

In all the talk of fake news, the real issue is many of us are only seeing part of the real news—the part that agrees with our biases. A new startup has a solution.

Show Notes

In 2011, the former executive director of MoveOn gave a widely-viewed TED talk, “Beware Online Filter Bubbles“ that became a 2012 book and a startup. In all the talk of fake news these days, many of us have forgotten the unseen power of filter bubbles in determining the ways in which we think about politics, culture, and society. That startup tried to get people to read news they might otherwise not see by repackaging them with new headlines. 

 

A recent app, called Ground News, has a different approach. It lets you look up a topic and see how it’s covered by media outlets with identifiably left-leaning or right-leaning slants. You can read the coverage itself, right–left–moderate or internationally; look at its distribution; or track a story’s coverage over time. Most fundamentally, it’s a way of seeing stories that you wouldn’t ordinarily come across.

 

Our guest today is Sukh Singh, the chief technology officer of Ground News and one of its co-founders. 

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Fixing the Future from IEEE Spectrum magazine is a biweekly look at the cultural, business, and environmental consequences of technological solutions to hard problems like sustainability, climate change, and the ethics and scientific challenges posed by AI. IEEE Spectrum is the flagship magazine of IEEE, the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and the applied sciences.