The “Filter Bubble” and its effect on the public sphere Abstract In his book “The Filter Bubble,” Eli Pariser uncovered the secret power of the Internet: for the sake of personalization, services like Google, Facebook and Netflix let algorithms filter content to only deliver supposedly relevant information to their users. Suddenly, we are not confronted with human gatekeepers anymore, but with automated ones, calculated by machines. While this revelation had a lot of impact on users, it has an even more undiscussed relevancy for advertisers in the public sphere on how they can burst into the filter bubble of their target audience This comes on top of another challenge in a connected world: owned and paid media cannot compete with consumers’ trust in “recommendations from people I know” and “consumer opinions online.” Introduction “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa,” Mark Zuckerberg. The race among Internet-based companies is based on relevancy for the user. Google won against its competitors by serving not the overall, but the personal most relevant search results. Facebook is the dominant social network because its newsfeed shows users only activities of friends that one is actually interacting with – but does not fail to notify you about anyone’s birthdays, births and weddings. However, this personalization has led to a challenge for news consumption, as Eli Pariser argues in his groundbreaking book “The Filter Bubble,”1 in which he revealed the mechanics of machine algorithms for the first time. Our perception of reality in online channels is dependent on these algorithms, which do not show us what is relevant to society, but only show us what is relevant to ourselves. The fact that we have gatekeepers standing between information and us is not new. Old gatekeepers came in form of journalists and publishers. However, Pariser argues in his book, these gatekeepers had instilled a sense of public responsibility to show not just what we would like to see but what we should see. Societal impact aside, algorithms pose a challenge for advertisers as well. How can ad men serve information about new products and brands, when most of what people see on Facebook and Google is familiar content? The short answer would be to engage friends of friends. In the next two case studies, I examine how advertisers burst through the Filter Bubble and what we can learn from them.
Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, Penguin Press (New York, May 2011) ISBN 978-1-59420300-8 1
Case 1: Sharability through reframing – the case of Upworthy During the writing of the “The Filter Bubble”, Pariser was Board President of the online advocacy organization MoveOn.org. In this role, he tested the first reframing message of what is now known as the ‘Upworthy-style.’ MoveOn.org sent out a video of a man speaking in front of the Iowa Assembly in favor of gay marriage that had already gained some attention and 1 million views on YouTube. Instead of the original title of the video – ‘Zach Wahls speaks about family’ – MoveOn reframed the message: “Two lesbians raised a baby and this is what they got”. The number of views skyrocketed from 1 million views to 17 million. 2After that success, Pariser founded UpWorthy, a website that is dedicated “to make important stuff as viral as a video of some idiot surfing off his roof.”3 “Here’s the challenge: as more and more people discover news and content through Facebook-like personalized feeds, the stuff that really matters falls out of the picture. In the Darwinian environment of the hyper-relevant news feed, content about issues like homelessness or climate change can’t compete with goofy viral videos, celebrity news, and kittens. The public sphere falls out of view. And that matters, because while we can lose sight of our common problems, they don’t lose sight of us.”4 While Upworthy is considered a new form of journalism, its tactics are highly relevant to advertisers and have been proven to be successful for other media entities as well. Their three elements of success are: A) Reframing messages with a formula that can be summarized as: buzzword + positive adjective + curiosity gap + promise = engagement (= sharing); B) Writing 25 different headlines in this formula; C) Testing these A/B. Case 2: Storytelling – the Case of Innocent “We started innocent in 1999 after selling our smoothies at a music festival. We put up a big sign asking people if they thought we should give up our jobs to make smoothies, and put a bin saying 'Yes' and a bin saying 'No" in front of the stall. Then we got people to vote with their empties. At the end of the weekend, the 'Yes' bin was full, so we resigned from our jobs the next day and got cracking.”5 The origin story of innocent’s smoothies above is an example of brand storytelling that engages consumers on a more meaningful level than most brands do. It is taken out of a playbook by US-American union organizers of the 70s. Marshall Ganz, companion of labor leader Cesar Chavez and later mentor of now-President Obama, http://www.slideshare.net/Upworthy/the-sweet-science-of-virality, Slide 6 upwortyh.com/about, accessed July 4th, 2014 4 http://www.thefilterbubble.com/#sthash.xPTpk6eW.dpuf 5 http://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk/us/our-story accessed July 4th, 2014 2 3
developed three ‘stories’ to tell at every meeting. The Story of Self – a description on how oneself joined the movement; the Story of Us – a narrative of the beginning of said movement; and the Story of Now – why acting is a matter of urgency. All three stories had the same structure that is reflected in the innocent’s story and other successful brand stories: Setting, Challenge, Decision, and Solution. Conclusion The Filter Bubble posts an interesting challenge to advertisers that were used to sending ads by means of paid media without taking gatekeepers into account. Confronted with machine algorithms, there are a multitude of case studies that show how advertisers can influence customer’s perception without being intrusive. Among the two described here, Buzzfeed as the fastest growing site online and the tactics of Content Marketers should be further researched to draw conclusions on the questions this paper has posed.