Are search engines bursting the filter bubble? Study finds political ideology plays bigger role than algorithms
May 2023, phys.org
Political ideology and user choice - not algorithmic curation - are the biggest drivers of engagement with partisan and unreliable news provided by Google Search, according to a study coauthored by Rutgers faculty published in the journal Nature.The study addressed a long-standing concern that digital algorithms learn from user preferences and surface information that largely agrees with users' attitudes and biases. However, search results shown to Democrats differ little in ideology from those shown to Republicans, the researchers found. The ideological differences emerge when people decide which search results to click, or which websites to visit on their own.
Something I've learned only recently with the critical-hype of generative machine learning -- when you say "AI is going to take over the world" you do nothing but make everyone else think AI is actually capable of of taking over the world. It can't make a picture of a ribbon of measuring tape where all the numbers show up in order; it can't do fingers, and it can't put things in people's mouths. It is not taking over the world. Not yet at least.
Same thing here - to think that "digital algorithms learn from user preferences and surface information that largely agrees with users' attitudes and biases" means that the overbloated supersurveillance machine that is the too big to fail digital ad economy can actually "learn from user preferences". All the algorithms know is how to make money (because that's what they're programmed to do). Everything else is a fluke.
via Rutgers: Ronald E. Robertson, Users choose to engage with more partisan news than they are exposed to on Google Search, Nature (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06078-5.
Image credit: AI Art - Antique Technical Drawing Ink on Paper - 2022
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