Trapped in an Ever-Constricting Bubble: The Rise of Extremism through Technology

“It’s not that I think 5G is harmful,” Sara’s friend says, casually over lunch. “I just worry about all the technology being introduced in our daily lives.”

Sara is currently distracted by a sandwich too large for her mouth and merely mumbles in return. She doesn’t know anything about 5G. She knows that she’s heard a lot about it, but she doesn’t remember if it was in a positive or negative light. Still, it sticks in her mind.

Later, at home, Sara searches for “is 5G harmful” on Google. She receives many results, many of which seem to say, “Probably not, but hey, maybe?” Sara finds the answer unsatisfying. Many of the headlines she sees are somewhat catastrophic: “The Great 5G Conspiracy,” for instance, a thoughtful but long article that Sara does not read, but does scan. While the article seems neutral to her, she does note that there are many people against 5G.

That interests her. She wants to know more about the people against 5G, so now she searches for “activists against 5G.” She goes past three pages of results — because she’s intentionally looking for something specific, even if she doesn’t realize it — to a Jacksonville.com article: Uncontrolled 5G threatens quality of life.

At this point, Sara’s quandary is this: At a minimum, scientific articles appear to admit that there could be some negative impact of 5G, even though it hasn’t been proven.

Digging a little deeper, Sara searches for the “hazards of EMF,” the type of radiation promoted by 5G. She is immediately given a Healthline article that lists dire consequences: sleep disturbances, headache, depression, tiredness, and fatigue.

Even more alarmingly, the Healthline article itself (given at the top of the Google search) seems to imply its own form of cover-up. While the Healthline article first states that there is no research suggesting that EMFs “harm human health,” it then lists a very compelling series of reasons why EMFs could potentially harm human health.

There’s disagreement over EMF safety because there’s no strong research suggesting that EMFs harm human health.

According to the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), EMFs are “possibly carcinogenic to humans.” The IARC believes that some studies show a possible link between EMFs and cancer in people.

The researchers followed cancer rates and cellphone use in more than 5,000 people in 13 countries around the world. They found a loose connection between the highest rate of exposure and glioma, a type of cancer that occurs in the brain and spinal cord.

The gliomas were more often found on the same side of the head that people used to speak on the phone. However, the researchers concluded that there was not a strong enough connection to determine that cellphone use caused cancer in the research subjects.

In a smaller but more recent study, researchers found that people exposed to high levels of EMF for years at a time showed an increased risk of a certain type of leukemia in adults.

At this point, Sara is still no conspiracy theorist. Sara is still a reasonable young woman with practical concerns. She knows that she’s been researching this for all of fifteen minutes on the internet — but Sara is also a skeptic. She assumes professionals write Healthline articles, and it’s easy to ignore that she has been explicitly searching for anything that could validate her fears.

Sara now turns to social media. She searches for “5G” on Twitter, but all she gets is companies such as AT&T and T-Mobile, boasting their wide 5G networks (something that is now a cause for concern).

So she goes a step further, searching for “5G danger.”

Her circle has narrowed. It has become biased. But it happened so subtly that she didn’t even realize it.

Now, she sees an article almost immediately, “On the clear and almost-present danger of 5G: Two op-eds from New Zealand.” She doesn’t understand the science laid out here, but it is compelling: She is now even more worried about the potential for 5G damage. Another article, directly below this: Two Non-Profits Say FCC is Ignoring Evidence of Cell Phone and Wireless Exposure Harm.

Sara has now formed her opinion: 5G is dangerous.

What the Hell Just Happened to Sara?

Sara was able to move from a relatively neutral stance to an extreme one within an hour online. And while Sara is fictional, the patterns were not. This is something that happens to people every single day.

First, the Internet, of course, is vast. But modern search engines make it possible for people to find what they’re looking for with extreme specificity. Search engines such as Google are designed to deliver you what Google thinks you will find most compelling. This information is rated by how long you spend reading an article.

So, when people look up information — such as whether 5G is dangerous — Google isn’t rating these articles by validity. Google is rating articles by how interesting they are to the person reading them.

Sara’s downfall can be attributed to several behaviors that we all share:

• Sara spent more time on sites that were easily digested. She spent more time on the Healthline article than the article from The Atlantic because the Atlantic article was more challenging for her to scan.
• Sara believed information more readily when it appeared to come from an authority. The Healthline article was not part of her search query results. It was an official callout from Google’s search engine. Thus, Sara lent this article more credence from the beginning.
• Sara started to tailor her searches toward the information she wanted to see. As Sara became more concerned about the effects of 5G, she started searching for things like “5G danger” rather than “5G effects.” This occurred so subtly that she did not realize she was beginning to bias her own searches.
• Sara took in information from sites that just wanted to generate clicks. Many of the headlines she saw (“Is there a 5G conspiracy?”) were primed to make her think there was a problem. Since she never read the articles, she was influenced by the headlines, rather than the content.

Once Sara had already gone down the rabbit hole, it started to continually narrow until it confirmed something that she had previously been merely open to. Through minimal fault of her own, Sara now has a wealth of data in her mind that says that 5G is harmful, some of it coming from very compelling sources.

But that’s only the first hour.

Come back in a week. Now, Sara has followed Twitter accounts devoted to the dangers of 5G. She has joined Facebook groups. Her advertising preferences have been tailored toward an interest in 5G activism. In just seven days, the entirety of Sara’s online existence has been penetrated by this one issue.

And that means that her online social media presence, her online social media feed, is going to deliver reaffirmations of this belief to her continuously.

Now, in Sara’s world, 5G is a legitimate and all-present concern — it is everywhere.

A Singular Experience of Reality

Just as Sara has customized her feed of information, everyone else does, too, often without realizing it. Someone who believes pit bulls should be banned will get delivered more articles about pit bulls attacking babies — and someone who believes pit bulls are entirely safe will get delivered articles about pit bulls saving families. Thus, both people start to live in worlds with opposing evidence, each person reacts to the evidence they have been delivered, and each arrives at entirely different and polarized results.

In the old days, there was a single county newspaper. And of course, this newspaper was still skewed. But it was universal: People received the same information.

And, at the local bar, people interacted with people in their geographic proximity. While there were general beliefs that correlated with demographics, there was always that crazy guy who believed 5G would melt his brain, and there was still that polite professor who would correct him. There was an open, social forum and a general consensus that was less specific and less targeted.

Importantly, you were never in a group of 20 people who thought that 5G would melt your brain, at least not without some startling intentionality. And this is what created a natural barrier to echo chambers occurring in everyday life, though, of course, they still existed — mainly in the form of extremist groups.

Today, people can accidentally inhabit dozens of echo chambers at once, all reaffirming extremist beliefs. Whether it’s something as minimal to daily life as “Should Pitbulls Be Banned?” or something as remarkable as “Is the Earth Flat?” we wear our opinions on our sleeves, and we court those who share them.

Trapped in an Endless Loop of Sad Puppies

We think you’d be interested in this news:

EIGHTEEN PUPPIES DIE IN A FIRE. BUT YOU’LL BE SURPRISED BY WHAT HAPPENED TO THE DUCKLING THAT WATCHED.

How did we do?

None of the above is mere theory or conjecture. I’ve personally experienced a feedback loop, one which I cannot escape. And because it had nothing to do with merchandise, political theory, or bunk science, it was extremely noticeable when it happened.

You see, for the last twelve months, my advertising feed has been exclusively videos about sad puppies.

I can tell you exactly how it began:

• Someone shared a rescue video with me.
• I watched the video because I am not a monster.
• Facebook decided to share other dog rescue videos with me.
• I clicked on them.

You can see where I made a mistake.

Here’s the issue with click-bait in the dog rescue community. The titles are like this:

• DOG STUNG BY EIGHTY THOUSAND WASPS. BUT THEN THE LAST WASP DOES SOMETHING SURPRISING…
• THIS DOG HAD ALL HIS FEET CUT OFF AND REPLACED BY OTHER DOGS’ FEET. BUT THEN…
• CAN THIS PUPPY SURVIVE THE ARCTIC NIGHT? PROBABLY NOT. BUT THIS POLAR BEAR CUB…

It’s obviously click-bait. However, because the thumbnail was always a suffering puppy, I would still click on the video to see that the dog was okay. Let’s be clear: I understood I was being emotionally manipulated. I was just being emotionally manipulated well.

PSA: Regardless of the compulsion, don’t ever watch these videos unless the videos have a watermark from an actual rescue organization. YouTubers and other internet stars have been abusing and even killing animals to create fake rescue videos for likes.

The problem is that because I kept clicking those videos, Facebook kept serving me those videos. And because everything on the Internet is linked, Google then started sending me those videos. Since Google runs the most extensive advertising system in the world…

Today, a year into this, the only ads I ever see are videos about sad puppies. I don’t just mean ads on websites. I mean my Facebook feed is littered with them. And I’ve stopped watching them, for the most part. I’ve tried my best. Unfortunately, the AI that generates these ads and promotes these social media posts is so front-loaded with data saying, “I like it when puppies are sad,” that I cannot escape from this well of my own making.

Of Course, It’s Good for Business

I don’t know how many advertising dollars I’ve made “Sad Puppy Video Corp” so far, but it’s probably a decent chunk.

Echo chambers aren’t anything new. Social media platforms have been aware of them for some time. But the truth is, they’re good for advertisers. Echo chambers are good for business because they make it easier to target those most likely to be interested. The more specific your interests are, the more fine-tuned your extremism, the more potential there is a product that’s perfect for you.

When it comes to social media platforms, advertising is what they need to survive. Social media is free. What funds it? Advertising. Without advertising, these social media platforms wouldn’t exist. The lack of monetization is what led to the collapse of platforms such as Vine — wildly popular, but impossible to monetize reliably.

But Wait: Are Echo Chambers Dangerous?

At this point, I’ve given you hypothetical stories and anecdotes. But these are just stories, just like a story about how 5G caused a single person migraines, or about how companies have pushed countries to adopt 5G standards despite controversial evidence. It’s just words on a page.

As far as studies go, echo chambers themselves might not be dangerous. People who have similar political opinions will discuss them with each other, just as individuals go to special interest groups and political parties. While these echo chambers can be influenced relatively easily by a fairly small number of people, the same is true of virtually any social endeavor: There are always leaders, connectors, and influencers.

We don’t yet understand how damaging echo chambers could be socially. Some studies have shown they can even be beneficial. Others say that echo chambers are, in fact, a myth: That people who are in “echo chambers” go out of their way to seek an outside opinion. Confoundingly, it appeared that these outside opinions moved them more towards polarization: Being confronted by nuanced views outside of their realm caused them to double down on their own. (This is a well known psychological phenomenon known as the Backfire Effect.)

So, just as people may be afraid of microwaves and their sudden ubiquity, people may also be fearful of social media, and its sudden ubiquity: uncontrollable change begets fear. Like all technology, there may simply be a transitional period, and that transitional period may be filled with inescapable, all-encompassing, sad puppies.

Most people will say that social media has “been found to be harmful” — it’s common knowledge. But social media research is conflicting; it’s also been found to be beneficial.

As a seemingly inescapable part of today’s life, it appears as though social media can be good or bad depending on how people use it. When used as a coping mechanism or to reach out to others during difficult times, social media (and the corresponding echo chambers) appear to be helpful. But when people begin to compare themselves to social media or dwell on negative spaces, it can become harmful.

The problem, naturally, is that social media also isn’t “just a tool.” The danger with social media lies in those who control it. Much has been said about Facebook’s secret mood manipulation experiments, during which time Facebook found that it could manipulate a user’s mood using their feed. Therefore, Facebook controls the perspective of a population — whether or not it takes advantage of that fact.

And if Facebook decided to get political…

Piercing the Technology Bubble

So, what can users do to prevent themselves from getting trapped in a bubble? It requires proactive measures.

In Sara’s case, she needed to ask herself:

• Are the sources I’m looking at biased?
• Is the information that I’m getting tailored to me?
• Am I looking for a specific answer?

But the truth is that Sara will probably never know the truth. Unless Sara can conduct her own 5G experiments, she will eventually need to take the sum of knowledge that she has gathered and draw her own conclusions. And thus, we come to the last point:

• Am I open to reevaluating my conclusions?

A bubble isn’t always “are vaccines going to kill my children” or “is 5G going to melt my brain.” More subtle bubbles occur every day when you feel tired and depressed and notice that all the news is just awful. Your friends are fighting about God knows what on Facebook, your Twitter feed is canceling your favorite artist, and CNN is reporting on sad, lonely whales. During that time, you need to take action to break the feedback loop.

That begins with an understanding that the information that you see on a day-to-day basis is guided by and molded by you. The more you dive deeply into anything today, the more of that you’ll see. Feelings such as anger, rage, and even disbelief are strong within the moment, they can guide our clicks and our views, and they can pull us into a continually expanding pit of despair.

So, for at least today — give yourself a break.