FILTER BUBBLE: THE DEATH OF FREE WILL?

 Free will is a very important aspect of a free society. It is what you exercise when you are in the Polling Booth alone, choosing which candidate you shall vote for. It is what you exercise in determining where to live, work or who to marry. It is what you exercise in deciding which religion, political party or group you shall join. It is what you exercise in deciding to take one choice over the other without any impediment.

Can you still claim to have free will when your available options of choice have been pre-determined for you without your knowledge? When your choices of friends on social media have been pre-selected for you? When the political ideology you hold has been pre-enforced for you? When the product or services you will purchase has been pre-preference for you? Welcome to the age of the Filter Bubble.

A filter bubble as Eli Pariser would put it “is the creation of an authority around oneself that the information you receive should confirm or be compatible with your own opinion, belief, or wants. Any information that is contrary to you is locked out.”

In this age of technology, a filter bubble is a form of Artificial intelligence that selectively guesses what information an internet user would like to see. A Filer bubble is built by website coders, who by relying on our personal information on various internet platforms such as social media to get information on our age, location, previous searches, sex, political ideology, past choices and preferences, news we read, event we follow etc. to create a logarithm that filter which information we should receive and what should be locked out. This logarithm becomes the “authority”. The authority pre-decides for you (without your knowledge) what information you should access based on your personal information they have collected.  Therefore, when using the internet you end up only having access to information that confirms or is similar to your own personal opinion and contrary opinion is locked out.

The challenge is; it is not you who decides how this “authority” exercises this authority on choosing what to lock out and what to accept in. This is dangerous because first you essentially lose your freewill; you surrender your power to decide which information you get when using the internet to this authority. Secondly, you end up being locked in your own opinion and beliefs without getting another perspective of the issues. Your perspective is left unchallenged since contrary opinion is locked out by this “authority”. This leads to biases or a form of intellectual isolation. Further, you are denied the opportunity to know what information was locked out by this “authority”.

 Consider it this way, Choices and action stem from thoughts. Thoughts are dependent on the information a person is supplied with. Thus, if a person is supplied with given information, their thoughts, and subsequently their choices are influenced. No one is immune from the information received from social media, news and what we read, this factors distorts our understanding and hampers our ability to balance decisions, therefore influencing our choices.

For instance, a logarithm on social media determines which friend suggestions you receive based on your contact list, schools you went, political party you are in, age, locality etc. Therefore you end up being surrounded by people who think or hold the same opinion or belief like you and locks out anyone with a contrary opinion. You therefore live in an illusion that your perspective is correct since everyone holds the same opinion and your internet search confirms the same to be true. Yet, in reality you are in a bubble that only allows information compatible with your perspective to get in.

A Filter bubble is important in this age of information where “censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information and therefore we are unable to know what to pay attention to and what to ignore and we end up spending most of our time investigating and debating on the authenticity of the information rather than the content of the information. In ancient times power was to have access to data but in current age power is to know what to ignore.” And due to this need to know what to ignore, filter bubble comes to play this noble role.

In this age of technology our personal information on our activities and choices are out there somewhere being processed and shall be used to influence us to buy or use a given product or service or vote for a particular candidate.

 In as much as the filter bubble comes to play this crucial role of limiting the flooding of information to people, we pay it with the high cost of our own free will. Initially internet and social media provided an avenue to get diverse view points, perspective, ideas and opinions leading to a diverse pool of information in decision making but with the creation of the filter bubble logarithms in search engines, social media and other areas; internet is now an area to reinforce our biases.

As Bill Gates would put it, that technology  “lets you go off with like-minded people, so you’re not mixing and sharing and understanding other points of view … It’s super important. It’s turned out to be more of a problem than I, or many others, would have expected.”

In democratic society, democracy works because citizens are able to get views beyond their narrow self-interest and there is a healthy exchange of information but with coming of the filter bubble citizens only receive political information that is similar to theirs and denying them the opinion to hear the contrary opinion of other members in the society.

So as Filter Bubble logarithm continue to take grip of our flow of information, maybe freewill will just be an illusion, and our choices will be predetermined by other parties other than ourselves. This will call upon each person to take initiative to seek contrary opinion of others. It will require legal reform to ensure website coders are ethical in creating these logarithms or else Free will is dead. We need to continuously ask: What obligations does every technology innovation and company have in exchange to the power they have due to the personal information they hold? With every technological advancement, this question needs to be answered.