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Why 2017 Was The Year Of The Filter Bubble?

Kalev Leetaru
This article is more than 3 years old.

One could be forgiven for thinking 2017 was The Year of the Filter Bubble. While Eli Pariser introduced the world to the term half a decade ago, this was the year it seemed to really take off. You could hardly have a conversation about social media this year without the discussion turning at some point to just how much social media is apparently shaping how we understand the world around us. What caused filter bubbles to leap into the public conscious in 2017?

Scholars have long studied the interplay between users and the interfaces they use to produce and consume information and the active role those interfaces play in shaping our seeking and production behavior. In the internet era, a small number of programmers in Silicon Valley have increasingly wielded incredible power over our digital selves, yet ordinary users have remained blissfully ignorant of the degree to which their online activities are shaped. This changed in 2011 when Eli Pariser brought the term “filter bubble” into the public consciousness with his TED2011 talk and book on the ways in which the digital platforms that govern our online world control and shape what we see and pay attention to.

With the release of his TED talk video and book in May 2011 suddenly the notion of remote masters actively controlling and shaping what all the world could see of human knowledge became a household term, marking the moment the term entered the modern public lexicon.

Kalev Leetaru / Google Trends

Look closely at the graph above, which plots Google searches for the phrase “filter bubble” in the United States since 2004 and you will notice a slight, but noticeable interest in the topic in November 2016. The US presidential election seems to have temporarily increased interest in the notion of walled gardens of information. Did the general public simply associate an unexpected election outcome with filter bubbles or what precisely seems to have driven this renewed interest in a topic that had been largely stable for quite some time?

Perhaps the graph below can offer some clues. It plots the percent of all global English-language news coverage monitored by the GDELT Project by day from January 1, 2016 to this past Monday that contained the phrases “filter bubble(s),” “online bubble(s),” or “information bubble(s).” The notion of being surrounded by a walled garden of information we agree with, at least as expressed in those specific terms, seems to have attracted fairly little attention until the early hours of November 9, 2016 – the day after the US presidential election. While election day itself had a small smattering of mundane pieces about online filtering, the day after opened the floodgates with apocalyptic headlines breathlessly proclaiming that the algorithms had completed their takeover of human society and we were all now wrapped in our respective bubbles that had completely separated us from any semblance of shared reality.

Kalev Leetaru / GDELT Project

This is followed by additional bursts of coverage on January 26th with Facebook’s adjustments to its Trending Topics module, February 17th with Mark Zuckerberg’s “Informed Communities” manifesto that centers on the topic and March 12th with push back from media companies about their role in filter bubbles and “fake news.” While media attention has died down a bit, it has become an integral part of the media discourse since the election.

In fact, 86% of the English language news coverage of filter bubbles over the last two years monitored by GDELT has been published on or after November 9th, 2016, capturing just how pivotal that date is to driving the concept of filter bubbles into the public sphere.

The other big social media concern of 2017, “fake news” was also born in the days following the 2016 election, bursting into popular use November 11th as Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed “Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, of which it’s a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea … I do think there is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is they saw some fake news.”

Yet, perhaps the most intriguing finding comes from comparing these two graphs. November 2016 marked the birth of the filter bubble as the media’s scapegoat for all that doesn’t make sense in society. On the other hand, while web searches for the topic do increase slightly, this trend does not begin to approach to totality of the shift in press coverage. Either we all think we already know what a filter bubble is and have no interest in learning more or there is a divide between how the press is understanding the impact of social media and how the general public views it. Are we all just so inured to how the digital world controls us that we simply aren't interested anymore?

Putting this all together, it is fascinating that two of the biggest conversation items of 2017 when it comes to social media, filter bubbles and fake news, were born out of the 2016 election. Whether we really are all withdrawing from the world around us into an algorithmically constructed utopia or whether these digital filter bubbles are having no greater impact on our lives than the physical ones we have constructed since the dawn of time remains to be seen, but as digital platforms increasingly mediate the world around us, they are increasingly the perfect scapegoat, rightfully or wrongfully, for a diverse world where not everyone thinks alike.

