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Few people are actually trapped in filter bubbles. Why do they say they are?

95 points by Reedx 8y ago

stakhanov 8y ago
Regarding the point about filter bubbling in DuckDuckGo: My guess would be that it's not a trivial problem for them to undo the filter bubbling that their search providers are doing. But, I think if three people were to hit the "refresh" button 10 times on the same query, then the variation seen by one single person is probably similar to the variation seen across different people running the same query.
lkdjjdjjjdskjd 8y ago
Let's be honest: without filter bubbles, (social) media would be pretty much unbearable.
gundmc 8y ago
"Filter Bubbles" are a real phenomenon to be wary of, particularly for something like YouTube that aggressively suggests videos and autoplays by default or Facebook that injects stories into your news feed. I think what the article misses on that front is not that users don't have access to other sources, but they're passively spoon fed stories that reinforce their beliefs. But I'm not convinced this expands to Search. Search algorithm implementations are enough of a nebulous black box that it makes for a convincing story, and Duck Duck Go has been shamelessly spinning that FUD for advertising, but the claims don't really stand up to scrutiny.
- spondyl 8y ago
  It's somewhat anecdotal but in my experience, Twitter search can be quite filter bubbly. I've had this recording sitting around in my YouTube account which illustrates an example of this: CES 2015 which was around the time of the shit show known as Gamergate. The event aside, it was interesting to understand how sides were inflamed based on what they were seeing thanks to Twitter effectively amplifying similar opinions, creating an echo chamber. Here's a link to the recording: https://youtu.be/yoCcKYJ7hDI https://youtu.be/yoCcKYJ7hDI On the left is an account that was heavily skewed on purpose, towards the more conservative group while on the right is what a regular, unlogged in user would see. A regular user would have no idea of such an event going on while the user on the left would think that this event was engulfing the planet based on the sheer amount of noise being generated. For users on the left, it would be near impossible to penetrate the noise, based on retweets and likes, short of a tweet being passed around for users to jeer at. A literal bubble in that sense. The sad part is that a great number of people from both sides seemingly had a lot in common without realising it. Unfortunately they had no visibility of the "others" short of going out of their way to meet people and talk with them one on one. As we all know, it's easier to just label a foreign group and pretend we're objectively right. Anyway, that's just my experience with filter bubbles anyway. Hopefully you found it interesting.
  - kochikame 8y ago
    Your comment put me in mind of the "get Pao out" hate campaign at Reddit a few years back. At its peak, its most incendiary, bile-spewing peak, if you were not looking at the standard "all" front page you would have had no idea it was even happening at all. With "all" as your default page, it was literally full of it, maybe your top two pages just entirely anti-Pao memes etc. The difference was so stark it was hard to believe I was even using the same Reddit as these people
    - cableshaft 8y ago
      I miss most Reddit garbage now that I no longer go to the front page. I mainly stick to a few subreddits now, like r/boardgames, and the moderators actively keep that stuff out since it has nothing to do with the subject. I think I saw a little of the Pao stuff back then, but I think I saw it from other sites, like Kotaku.
  - avar 8y ago
    > A regular user would have no idea of such an event going on[...] The account on the right still had several "#GamerGate" tweets, including one from Milo Yiannopoulos who was involved enough to be covered in the Wikipedia article about it[1]. It seemed to me the main difference in the logged-in & logged-out account in that video is that the logged-out one is getting press release content, perhaps the logged-in account wasn't responsive to that according to Twitter's algorithms? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy
- Theodores 8y ago
  Recently I discovered a 'filter bubble' in search. In an online discussion I mentioned the Peasant's Revolt in passing, which, for me, based in England, results in the events of 1381 when the English king who was all of fourteen years old agreed to meet the rebel leader only to kill him. What I had not realised is that a search for 'Peasant's Revolt' is different depending on where you live. So in Germany the search will result in a German 'Peasant's Revolt'. As it turns out every country has had some 'Peasant's Revolt' at some stage of history. I have not tested what results you will get if you search for the same 'event' elsewhere, e.g. in Italy, but I wouldn't be surprised if that gave an Italian 'Peasant's Revolt' as the top search result with the events of 1381 in England far, far down the list. This would be correct behaviour from the search engine but is still a filter bubble. It is okay for us to have different perspectives yet share the same facts and history.
tarboreus 8y ago
This article is attacking a strawman, defining filter bubble extremely narrowly.
willio58 8y ago
This is not what’s filter bubble is, it’s a subset of the broader idea.
pessimizer 8y ago
The idea that people who report being intensely allied to particular political parties would automatically be the people who we should be most concerned about being in filter bubbles is bizarre, and is part of a broader media narrative that all opinions right or left of the NYT and WaPo editorial pages are the result of manipulation. This seems like one of a cluster of centrist articles attempting to debunk this idea, specifically targeted at Republican bleating about tech-media companies hiding left-wing bias behind claims that they have objective algorithms that have no particular political content. They're twisting the finding, culled from mashing together a number of studies (not any particular study) and summarized in a whitepaper, that find when you monitor the people who self-report the most partisan consumption of news, it turns out that they actually read a lot of different sources. In other words, they've discovered that the most angry readers of news spend as much time hate-reading as reading outlets that they agree with. Interesting finding by itself. Instead of reporting that, though, they transform the group that most self-reports being in what the authors would call a filter bubble (i.e. they report only watching Maddow or only watching Fox) into the group most likely in a filter bubble, they find that group to not be in a filter bubble, then they declare the non-existence of filter bubbles. It's really garbled logic. I'd submit that the people most likely to be affected by a filter bubble would be the people who read political news the least, and where the few examples of what they look up would create a skewed algorithmic perception of their interests. I'd further submit that those people would far outnumber the extreme party partisans, but their votes would count equally, so the fact that extreme partisans who are already absolutely sure how they will vote are not trapped in filter bubbles is of far less importance than the people who are not sure about how they will vote, and are affected by new information.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  To be frank it seems like old media is increasingly wearing its envy on their sleeve relatively recently. They tried ignoring them at first. then they tried integrating where after ignoring everything on the internet suddenly leaping onto twitter. Then when that doesn't work they started getting angry and trying to make tech the new villain for everything. Like claiming that outright fabricated news for an agenda started with them - no just look at Hearst for one. There is the incredibly obvious 'tech-lash' astroturfed push and trying to invoke antitrust - all while dutifully ignoring the actual monopolies and media conglomeration. And the Sinclair 'hive-mind' dystopian propaganda pushing that received far less attention than Facebook selling ads.
davidivadavid 8y ago
I wonder if anyone is banking on a reversal of that perception of "filter bubbles"? It seems to me that creating "filter bubbles" not only should be the goal of social networks, but that it's a desirable goal. Obviously, someone will have to come up with better branding to wash off the stink from that term, but the underlying concept is what people fundamentally want, and it's here to stay. Facebook recently changed their vision statement to talk about making communities more tightly-knit, and so on. This can only be done by curating content and limiting information to stuff that attracts people together and makes them feel at home. People have limited time and attention. Dunbar's number imposes constraints on how much data/people they can keep up with. And people want that circle to be as pleasant an experience as possible. I'll be the first to make that bet if no one else has: the social network that will displace Facebook will displace it because it will embrace filter bubbles, not "solve" them as if they were a problem.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  > It seems to me that creating "filter bubbles" not only should be the goal of social networks, but that it's a desirable goal. The reason people come to that conclusion is this: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ If you show people things from other tribes, the reasonable stuff the other tribe has to say gets buried under the epic war both sides are thrust into as soon as anyone says anything recursively controversial. The problem we have now is that existing networks profit from showing you only that portion of what the other tribe has to say, because it's what increases "engagement" (i.e. time spent fighting/arguing on the internet). What would be desirable would be to do the exact opposite -- bury the toxoplasma but still show the material from other tribes that isn't virally outrage-generating. That may not maximize number of hours spent per user, but if people like it more, it could maximize total number of users, which is how you build network effects -- and that's the hardest thing for a new network to do. It would also presumably benefit things like mutual understanding, unity and general happiness.
  - davidivadavid 8y ago
    Yeah, I understand the mechanics for the way the bubbles form, and how engagement-driven networks can skew their composition. The more relevant SSC article for me when it comes to that subject is this one: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-...
JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
My parents are completely in a Fox News bubble and so are lots of other people unfortunately. It changed their views completely. Prior to Fox News they were reasonable humans that saw things in a rounded way and that eroded upon repeated exposure to it. I wish they had never gotten cable.
- dahart 8y ago
  My wife and I were able to help her father escape the Fox bubble. The film “Outfoxed” was useful in our case, FWIW.
- wincy 8y ago
  I have two sets of grandparents, one is constantly angry and watching Fox News, and the others are angry and watching CNN. Neither will accept any sort of news story from a source that’s not “unbiased”, which means seems to mean supports their side. It’s really frustrating.
  - EGreg 8y ago
    Put em at the same table at dinner! Maybe they can duke it out and come to a conclusion. I find watching biased news from both sides gives me more info than “moderate” lukewarm reporting. Biased sources tend to make stronger arguments for their narratives and omit less “inconvenient” details of the other side. Also a good way to approach any world conflict or propaganda.
    - speedplane 8y ago
      Biased sources often appeal more to emotion than reason.
    - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
      > I find watching biased news from both sides gives me more info than “moderate” lukewarm reporting. Biased sources tend to make stronger arguments for their narratives and omit less “inconvenient” details of the other side. Different parties are right about different things. For example, Trump is unfairly maligned on trade. The tariffs on China are extremely modest -- we tax domestic producers more than that on net. And something has to compensate for China purposely tilting the playing field a hundred different ways. But if you look at left of center media you'd think the tariffs were destroying the economy, with no data but plenty of anecdotes from companies whinging about having to pay a little more for goods from sweatshops in China. On the other hand, Trump's position on coal is completely indefensible. Which implies "moderate" isn't a real thing. Saying he's half right on trade and half right on coal isn't moderation, it's gibberish. He's mostly right on trade and entirely wrong on coal. Sawing the baby in half every time is no better than uncritically believing one side over the other. The trouble is the mainstream sources, especially on cable, are still terrible -- even the ones with an obvious affiliation frequently don't present the best argument for their positions because their goal is to lather up the base and generate ratings rather than actually inform anyone. And both sides ignore anything that isn't politically expedient. They never really go after the banks, the insurance companies, government contractors or employees -- or if they do it's a populist call to riot rather than any kind of principled proposal to make specific changes. The best thing to do is to rely on domain experts and primary sources, which are much easier to access now that most everything is on the internet, but it's still more time consuming than most people are going to be able to commit to. Which is maybe why everything is such a mess. It seems like we need journalists with an opinion but not a party.
lucideer 8y ago
This is a pretty pointless and contentless article. As others have pointed out, it's attacking a strawman, so the point isn't even relevant. But even if it were, what's the conclusion? There's a graph of people's trust in media, and some quotes from DDG's marketing—neither of which seem relevant to the central point. > are filter bubbles really the problem here? Danny Sullivan [...] argues fairly persuasively that they’re not because even DuckDuckGo users see different results. What is this sentence? Argues conclusively what? If anything, it supports the thesis that they exist (by this article's awkward definition), since they also pervade even DDG.
joncrane 8y ago
Ironically, Pandora's whole point is to create the musical equivalent of filter bubbles, and it's really cool.
- chrisco255 8y ago
  Yeah, I use Pandora when I want repetition and I use Spotify to discover new music or see what my friends are listening to.
jorgesborges 8y ago
This is just tangential personal reflection but I feel like at every stage in my life I've been in some kind of bubble. Bubbles come and go depending on my environment and life experience. Being situated on a university campus, mostly insulated from the concerns of the real world and free to exercise the curiosities of youth -- that was probably my first big bubble. I had no access to or understanding of the concerns of most people working to make a living or raising families. Similarly I can think of periods of time when I was in a bad relationship, or stuck at a menial job. My day-to-day experience constitutes a filter bubble, and I don't even think it's good or bad. I feel like the media bubbles under discussion are symptomatic of a larger cultural malady in which our experience, our own personal bubbles, are so confused and impoverished that we jump at any screen or soundbite just to have some medium through which to experience anything.
fouc 8y ago
The author seems to miss the point of filter bubbles. There's a known cognitive bias where people tend to seek out information that mainly validates their existing views. Filter bubbles become a major enabler of that, allowing them to develop horse blinders to reality. Filter bubbles can lead people down into more extremist views that don't mesh with reality, rather than giving them exposure to counterarguments and allowing them to develop a more well-rounded view.
Johnny555 8y ago
Just because people may visit other news sources, they can still be in a Facebook filter bubble where everyone in their newsfeed thinks just like them. At least, that's how my facebook newsfeed looks, most of my Facebook friends/family have similar political views as me, so my news feed is full of stories and comments backing up my own political views. So even if I read opposing viewpoints in other news sites, my newsfeed still reinforces that those opposing viewpoints are invalid, and it makes it seem like everyone agrees with me.
colordrops 8y ago
An anecdote: When Bush Sr. died, I saw ~30 different comments and tweets about how sick they were of the constant barrage of praise for whom they surmised to be a war criminal, and yet I did not see one single bit of positive words spoken about him. It was splash of cold water awakening me to the depth of my filter bubble.
- nyolfen 8y ago
  i liked douthat’s editorial even without any particular personal sentimentality for wasps: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/opinion/george-bush-wasps.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/opinion/george-bush-wasps...
- mcv 8y ago
  In the Google+ RPG community, every once in a while I see people complain about asshats, attacks, harassment, etc. I rarely see the original behaviour that people complain about. I tend to see that as a sign that I've trimmed my circles well. Part of the problem here is of course the tendency of people to be assholes to people they tend to see as THEM, as the people who are causing whatever they believe is a problem. Most people don't like being exposed to abuse, so we close ourselves off from it, creating a safe space for ourselves, but also a filter bubble. Filter bubbles would be less of a problem if we could be nicer to each other, but that seems unlikely in an age of polarisation, vilification, paranoia, and a US president who has turned insults and mockery into the new standard.
chrisco255 8y ago
In my experience, few people are NOT trapped in a filter bubble. If you've ever moved from a conservative area to a liberal area of the country, or vice versa, you'll feel this in your interactions with people. In modern politics, it's far more difficult to find people who are able to constructively engage with both sides than it is to find blatant partisans. Simple test for this is to ask some one to describe the positions of the other party and why they feel the way they do without using any disparaging or cynical terms. Fun experiment, I invite you to try it.
- MrQuincle 8y ago
  Your approach sounds like a confrontational approach. In "The culture map" it is described that the US culture is far less confrontational than e.g. France. It might be difficult to engage in a discussion without disclaimers such as "let me play devil's advocate". As in this book is explained, an American was wondering why the French at the dinner table were laughing together after a heated discussion on a topic short before. A discussion is not a personal attack. However, in the US it is quicker felt this way. Hence, that people are not trapped in filter bubbles should not be countered by an argument based on a personal confrontational approach about how constructively they engage in political discussions.
  - honestoHeminway 8y ago
    In the cult of the individual, any confrontation is heresy. To be tortured for the comon good in the public plaza, by having your opinion attacked, that is pure evil. Rather fan out and form a thousand little new countries, within the country, declaring independence from washington or the rust-belt.
  - lanevorockz 8y ago
    French are not heavy users of social media. It is social media and agenda driven journalism that creates the polarisation.
    - sharemywin 8y ago
kijin 8y ago
> Few people are in complete filter bubbles in which they only consume, say, Fox News Sure, if you only want to count "complete" filter bubbles in which 100% of your search results come from a single source. Averaged over millions of people and billions of searches, however, even a 10% bias is likely to have a measurable effect. People don't get pushed over to one side of a partisan issue overnight. Like a pollutant in your drinking water, it takes a long time of constant exposure to unbalanced news for the subtle biases to seep into your brain and change how you see the world.
- mrweasel 8y ago
  Also one would assume that placing you 100% in one "bubble" would be bad for business. Sites wants to see if you need/can be pushed into yet unknown areas of interest. But sure, no one is actually trapped in a filter bubble. If you're aware that you're in a bubble, then it because much easier to escape. The problem is that most people aren't aware that they aren't seen all sides of an issue.
freeflight 8y ago
I wonder how one would go about actually quantifying any of this? The article tries to use two different studies to do this, but this approach seems flawed for the very simple reason that participants are not the same across both studies. Imho this whole problem is very comparable to being biased in general. We are all biased in some way or another and I like to think most of us are aware of this reality. But being aware of it does not simply translate to being aware of the full extent of the biases or lead to an outcome where the bias is "negated", if it is as easy as that, then barely anybody should be biased. In a way, it's like trying to define what goes on inside a blind spot, which by definition, is kinda impossible: If you'd be aware of your blind spot, it wouldn't be a blind spot anymore. I see the same problem with "filter bubbles", which in a way are just systemic biases very comparable how different social circles have different Overton windows. Most of these seem not to be forced upon people but are rather consequences of choices made based on personal biases/the Overton window often heavily influenced by in ones peer groups. While one might be aware of these choices, and how one reasoned them, that does not entail knowledge about the reality of other, maybe equally valid, choices. In that context, a lot of this feels more like a philosophical problem than an actual social one. People will, for the most part, rationalize their own choices as the "most valid ones". If they wouldn't, then they wouldn't have made those choices because only very few people make irrational choices on purpose for the sake of acting irrational.
- bad_user 8y ago
  >> “The article tries to use two different studies to do this, but this approach seems flawed for the very simple reason that participants are not the same across both studies.” That’s not a valid requirement. In fact using the same participants in multiple studies biases the results.
karmasimida 8y ago
For self-victimization, apparently.
coldtea 8y ago
>We’re not trapped in filter bubbles, but we like to act as if we are. Few people are in complete filter bubbles in which they only consume, say, Fox News, Matt Grossmann writes in a new report for Knight That's irrelevant. It's enough that their biases are regularly reinforced by the sources they follow (something modern social media and news aggregators make extremely easy), they don't have to "only consume" their side of the story.
im3w1l 8y ago
In my experience the same people that complain about filter bubbles also want offensive content gone. It seems the underlying motivation is just "show more of my beliefs less of theirs".
fareesh 8y ago
In my experience there are some good tests for this on various noteworthy political events in recent times. For example if you think that President Trump gave a press conference in which he referred to neo Nazis as very fine people, you are in a bubble because the context and quote are the exact opposite which he later clarifies when asked by the reporter, saying "I'm not talking about the Neo Nazis". If you believe that Hillary Clinton sold 20% of the USA's uranium to Russia in exchange for donations then you are in a bubble because that characterization is missing several key pieces of information. People treat future events based on what they have preconceived in these erroneous ways. The media distorts something with a tiny grain of truth into a narrative, and that narrative is what remains as a criteria for filtering future information. When you interact with ideologically entrenched folks, you can easily poke holes using examples like this. If they are reasonable they will recognize what has happened to them. If not reasonable, there will be cognitive dissonance and excuses as to why their belief is still right. The latter are not worth engaging with further because it's an uphill battle that will likely yield no progress. Media organizations like CNN and Fox News have become brazen in this regard. Recently CNN had a participant on a panel masquerading as a Trump voter, who was revealed to have a YouTube channel that espoused the exact opposite view. On a similar panel, key parts of answers on voter fraud were edited out of the final broadcast to make the respondent look uninformed, when they had, in fact, answered the question citing sources and narrating a great deal of information. Market forces have moved the keepers of the "Gated institutional narrative" further towards the new clickbait, ideological, tabloid brand of journalism, and we are all worse off for it.
newsgremlin 8y ago
Perhaps not entirely, but do filter bubbles become an issue when an individual is isolated in the same community for most of their life? I've slowly traveled outwards from my hometown of 2000~ people to now living in a city of 300k+, I've been to a few places between then and now but while my internet bubble has always been there, it hasn't consumed me.
codeulike 8y ago
Niemanlab seem a bit confused here. People have _always_ been in self-created filter bubbles - its called Confirmation Bias. The concern with Google and Facebook and YouTube is that they are now re-inforcing that confirmation bias even more. NiemanLab cite a few studies here but them seem to be focusing on Google Search Results whereas things like Facebook Walls and the way YouTube recommends 'extreme' points of view on any given topic are also of concern. Essentially a huge part of the internet is now optimising for clicks, which means targeted clickbait and sensationalism will always crowd out reasoned argument.
- lostmyoldone 8y ago
  Yeah, they seem to missing the point completely. The problem, which is hopefully well known, but bears repeating is that our brain learns the structure of the world by repetition and exposure, and typically seem to be quite unbiased apart from this exposure. Hence, a continuous over-abundance of content that caters to our biases will strongly affect our behavior, often even when we consciously think it's garbage. It is why and how advertising works, and probably why averages of peoples faces are seen as more beautiful than any of the faces in the mix. In sensor tasks, the vision system ( amongst other ) can be shown to be close to Bayesian perfect in how it recovers information from sensory input, which should give pause to any argument - as those in the article - that only complete filter bubbles should be seen as such. Even a partial filter bubble could, and anecdotally does, sometimes completely shortcut this information recovery from noisy data, as the basic "assumption" of the brain would have to be that the environment doesn't lie. Which in a bubble is no longer true. If we were adept at living in a world that lies to us, I imagine neuropathologies that create auditory hallucinations of various forms would not be even remotely as problematic as they are. But assuming a purely statistical interpretation of the environment, it's easy to see that eg a persistent voice in your head is going to cause serious issues over time. If you boil it all down, that is what a filter bubble becomes, a voice persistently telling lie about how the world looks and works, on average. This in turn can lead to radicalization, distrust, paranoia, and other forms of unhealthy thought patterns, as similar mechanisms does when "statistical lies" are generated internally by our minds.
thinkingemote 8y ago
I am not sure what I did with my filter bubble. Did I make it stronger or weaker, larger or smaller? The polarisation on twitter and Facebook after Brexit and the two years before and after the US election saw the losing tribe write off the other half as evil, selfish, needing to be re-educated, that democracy was over and a strong left hand was needed and that the free press needed regulation. These were views by some of you, CTO level educated SV technologists. I pointed out that the opposition wasn't evil, democracy was still valid, and mainly i pointed out how they were blinkered. Some people took it personally. Now they are not in my filter bubble. Worth saying that the winning tribalism was not in my filter bubble at any point. My bubble has less tribalism than before but it's also less large.
- nickthemagicman 8y ago
  How does one know when they're in a filter bubble?
jccalhoun 8y ago
This article doesn't really have a lot of meat to it. Despite that, I am very skeptical of the filter bubble idea and especially as it relates to customized internet search results. I found Eli Pariser's book to be very unconvincing. It is full of qualifiers like "might," "could," and "may" and few hard facts. To a degree we have always been in some kind of bubble because we aren't omniscient. Before electronic media, our knowledge of things outside our immediate circle was very limited. Was that a filter bubble? During the heyday of newspapers when a city had multiple newspapers there would be explicitly liberal and conservative newspapers (growing up my hometown newspaper was the Republican!) I feel like now I know a lot more about people who disagree with me than I ever did. I may not understand them but I know that Trump supporters, flat earthers, creationists, anti-vaxers, and people who care about sports all exist.
OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
fuck this attempt at creating self-doubt
rwj 8y ago
Beyond the filter bubble, I've noticed that a lot media spends most of their time in personal attacks, and very little time discussing the substance of any issue. Even when the discussion actually contains any substance, authors cannot refrain from poisoning the well. It isn't Person A believes ..., and Person B points to research ..., it is Left-wing ideologue idiot Person A believes crazy idea ...and well-respected patriot Person B point to research ... Both left and right partisan authors are using this style. I raise this point in a discussion about filter bubbles since I'm suspect the two aspects are self-reinforcing.
kristianc 8y ago
There's an interesting phenomenon here in the UK where a lot of the quality journalism on the right is behind a paywall, whereas a lot of the quality journalism on the left is ad-funded and freely available. I can see that being a potential amplifier of 'filter bubbles'.
- thecanman 8y ago
  Are your "Rights" and "Lefts" the same as ours in the US? I think it can all vary, but it would provide interesting context. Is the UK's right more closely aligned with the House of Lords or the like?
  - kristianc 8y ago
    They’re fairly similar - though the whole political spectrum is shifted to the left. The British Conservative Party is pro free market and low tax but socially liberal, with an Atlanticist foreign policy, and is in favor of single payer health care. The Labour Party is pro government intervention, state planning and redistributive taxes, less sceptical about regulation and has greater historic ties with Europe than with the US. It’s long described itself as a socialist party. The House of Lords is said to be a house of experts who have been chosen because of their specialist knowledge. Because it is unelected and made up of political appointees, it’s composition can change over time. There are however limits to what the Lords can actually do to block legislation, so it differs from the Senate. Bills can only be proposed in the House of Commons (so not like the US where either house can propose).

95 points by Reedx 8y ago

Regarding the point about filter bubbling in DuckDuckGo: My guess would be that it's not a trivial problem for them to undo the filter bubbling that their search providers are doing. But, I think if three people were to hit the "refresh" button 10 times on the same query, then the variation seen by one single person is probably similar to the variation seen across different people running the same query.

lkdjjdjjjdskjd 8y ago

Let's be honest: without filter bubbles, (social) media would be pretty much unbearable.

gundmc 8y ago

"Filter Bubbles" are a real phenomenon to be wary of, particularly for something like YouTube that aggressively suggests videos and autoplays by default or Facebook that injects stories into your news feed. I think what the article misses on that front is not that users don't have access to other sources, but they're passively spoon fed stories that reinforce their beliefs. But I'm not convinced this expands to Search. Search algorithm implementations are enough of a nebulous black box that it makes for a convincing story, and Duck Duck Go has been shamelessly spinning that FUD for advertising, but the claims don't really stand up to scrutiny.

spondyl 8y ago
It's somewhat anecdotal but in my experience, Twitter search can be quite filter bubbly. I've had this recording sitting around in my YouTube account which illustrates an example of this: CES 2015 which was around the time of the shit show known as Gamergate. The event aside, it was interesting to understand how sides were inflamed based on what they were seeing thanks to Twitter effectively amplifying similar opinions, creating an echo chamber. Here's a link to the recording: https://youtu.be/yoCcKYJ7hDI https://youtu.be/yoCcKYJ7hDI On the left is an account that was heavily skewed on purpose, towards the more conservative group while on the right is what a regular, unlogged in user would see. A regular user would have no idea of such an event going on while the user on the left would think that this event was engulfing the planet based on the sheer amount of noise being generated. For users on the left, it would be near impossible to penetrate the noise, based on retweets and likes, short of a tweet being passed around for users to jeer at. A literal bubble in that sense. The sad part is that a great number of people from both sides seemingly had a lot in common without realising it. Unfortunately they had no visibility of the "others" short of going out of their way to meet people and talk with them one on one. As we all know, it's easier to just label a foreign group and pretend we're objectively right. Anyway, that's just my experience with filter bubbles anyway. Hopefully you found it interesting.
- kochikame 8y ago
  Your comment put me in mind of the "get Pao out" hate campaign at Reddit a few years back. At its peak, its most incendiary, bile-spewing peak, if you were not looking at the standard "all" front page you would have had no idea it was even happening at all. With "all" as your default page, it was literally full of it, maybe your top two pages just entirely anti-Pao memes etc. The difference was so stark it was hard to believe I was even using the same Reddit as these people
  - cableshaft 8y ago
    I miss most Reddit garbage now that I no longer go to the front page. I mainly stick to a few subreddits now, like r/boardgames, and the moderators actively keep that stuff out since it has nothing to do with the subject. I think I saw a little of the Pao stuff back then, but I think I saw it from other sites, like Kotaku.
- avar 8y ago
  > A regular user would have no idea of such an event going on[...] The account on the right still had several "#GamerGate" tweets, including one from Milo Yiannopoulos who was involved enough to be covered in the Wikipedia article about it[1]. It seemed to me the main difference in the logged-in & logged-out account in that video is that the logged-out one is getting press release content, perhaps the logged-in account wasn't responsive to that according to Twitter's algorithms? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy
Theodores 8y ago
Recently I discovered a 'filter bubble' in search. In an online discussion I mentioned the Peasant's Revolt in passing, which, for me, based in England, results in the events of 1381 when the English king who was all of fourteen years old agreed to meet the rebel leader only to kill him. What I had not realised is that a search for 'Peasant's Revolt' is different depending on where you live. So in Germany the search will result in a German 'Peasant's Revolt'. As it turns out every country has had some 'Peasant's Revolt' at some stage of history. I have not tested what results you will get if you search for the same 'event' elsewhere, e.g. in Italy, but I wouldn't be surprised if that gave an Italian 'Peasant's Revolt' as the top search result with the events of 1381 in England far, far down the list. This would be correct behaviour from the search engine but is still a filter bubble. It is okay for us to have different perspectives yet share the same facts and history.

tarboreus 8y ago

This article is attacking a strawman, defining filter bubble extremely narrowly.

willio58 8y ago

This is not what’s filter bubble is, it’s a subset of the broader idea.

pessimizer 8y ago

The idea that people who report being intensely allied to particular political parties would automatically be the people who we should be most concerned about being in filter bubbles is bizarre, and is part of a broader media narrative that all opinions right or left of the NYT and WaPo editorial pages are the result of manipulation. This seems like one of a cluster of centrist articles attempting to debunk this idea, specifically targeted at Republican bleating about tech-media companies hiding left-wing bias behind claims that they have objective algorithms that have no particular political content. They're twisting the finding, culled from mashing together a number of studies (not any particular study) and summarized in a whitepaper, that find when you monitor the people who self-report the most partisan consumption of news, it turns out that they actually read a lot of different sources. In other words, they've discovered that the most angry readers of news spend as much time hate-reading as reading outlets that they agree with. Interesting finding by itself. Instead of reporting that, though, they transform the group that most self-reports being in what the authors would call a filter bubble (i.e. they report only watching Maddow or only watching Fox) into the group most likely in a filter bubble, they find that group to not be in a filter bubble, then they declare the non-existence of filter bubbles. It's really garbled logic. I'd submit that the people most likely to be affected by a filter bubble would be the people who read political news the least, and where the few examples of what they look up would create a skewed algorithmic perception of their interests. I'd further submit that those people would far outnumber the extreme party partisans, but their votes would count equally, so the fact that extreme partisans who are already absolutely sure how they will vote are not trapped in filter bubbles is of far less importance than the people who are not sure about how they will vote, and are affected by new information.

Nasrudith 8y ago
To be frank it seems like old media is increasingly wearing its envy on their sleeve relatively recently. They tried ignoring them at first. then they tried integrating where after ignoring everything on the internet suddenly leaping onto twitter. Then when that doesn't work they started getting angry and trying to make tech the new villain for everything. Like claiming that outright fabricated news for an agenda started with them - no just look at Hearst for one. There is the incredibly obvious 'tech-lash' astroturfed push and trying to invoke antitrust - all while dutifully ignoring the actual monopolies and media conglomeration. And the Sinclair 'hive-mind' dystopian propaganda pushing that received far less attention than Facebook selling ads.

davidivadavid 8y ago

I wonder if anyone is banking on a reversal of that perception of "filter bubbles"? It seems to me that creating "filter bubbles" not only should be the goal of social networks, but that it's a desirable goal. Obviously, someone will have to come up with better branding to wash off the stink from that term, but the underlying concept is what people fundamentally want, and it's here to stay. Facebook recently changed their vision statement to talk about making communities more tightly-knit, and so on. This can only be done by curating content and limiting information to stuff that attracts people together and makes them feel at home. People have limited time and attention. Dunbar's number imposes constraints on how much data/people they can keep up with. And people want that circle to be as pleasant an experience as possible. I'll be the first to make that bet if no one else has: the social network that will displace Facebook will displace it because it will embrace filter bubbles, not "solve" them as if they were a problem.

AnthonyMouse 8y ago
> It seems to me that creating "filter bubbles" not only should be the goal of social networks, but that it's a desirable goal. The reason people come to that conclusion is this: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ If you show people things from other tribes, the reasonable stuff the other tribe has to say gets buried under the epic war both sides are thrust into as soon as anyone says anything recursively controversial. The problem we have now is that existing networks profit from showing you only that portion of what the other tribe has to say, because it's what increases "engagement" (i.e. time spent fighting/arguing on the internet). What would be desirable would be to do the exact opposite -- bury the toxoplasma but still show the material from other tribes that isn't virally outrage-generating. That may not maximize number of hours spent per user, but if people like it more, it could maximize total number of users, which is how you build network effects -- and that's the hardest thing for a new network to do. It would also presumably benefit things like mutual understanding, unity and general happiness.
- davidivadavid 8y ago
  Yeah, I understand the mechanics for the way the bubbles form, and how engagement-driven networks can skew their composition. The more relevant SSC article for me when it comes to that subject is this one: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-...

JohnJamesRambo 8y ago

My parents are completely in a Fox News bubble and so are lots of other people unfortunately. It changed their views completely. Prior to Fox News they were reasonable humans that saw things in a rounded way and that eroded upon repeated exposure to it. I wish they had never gotten cable.

dahart 8y ago
My wife and I were able to help her father escape the Fox bubble. The film “Outfoxed” was useful in our case, FWIW.
wincy 8y ago
I have two sets of grandparents, one is constantly angry and watching Fox News, and the others are angry and watching CNN. Neither will accept any sort of news story from a source that’s not “unbiased”, which means seems to mean supports their side. It’s really frustrating.
- EGreg 8y ago
  Put em at the same table at dinner! Maybe they can duke it out and come to a conclusion. I find watching biased news from both sides gives me more info than “moderate” lukewarm reporting. Biased sources tend to make stronger arguments for their narratives and omit less “inconvenient” details of the other side. Also a good way to approach any world conflict or propaganda.
  - speedplane 8y ago
    Biased sources often appeal more to emotion than reason.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    > I find watching biased news from both sides gives me more info than “moderate” lukewarm reporting. Biased sources tend to make stronger arguments for their narratives and omit less “inconvenient” details of the other side. Different parties are right about different things. For example, Trump is unfairly maligned on trade. The tariffs on China are extremely modest -- we tax domestic producers more than that on net. And something has to compensate for China purposely tilting the playing field a hundred different ways. But if you look at left of center media you'd think the tariffs were destroying the economy, with no data but plenty of anecdotes from companies whinging about having to pay a little more for goods from sweatshops in China. On the other hand, Trump's position on coal is completely indefensible. Which implies "moderate" isn't a real thing. Saying he's half right on trade and half right on coal isn't moderation, it's gibberish. He's mostly right on trade and entirely wrong on coal. Sawing the baby in half every time is no better than uncritically believing one side over the other. The trouble is the mainstream sources, especially on cable, are still terrible -- even the ones with an obvious affiliation frequently don't present the best argument for their positions because their goal is to lather up the base and generate ratings rather than actually inform anyone. And both sides ignore anything that isn't politically expedient. They never really go after the banks, the insurance companies, government contractors or employees -- or if they do it's a populist call to riot rather than any kind of principled proposal to make specific changes. The best thing to do is to rely on domain experts and primary sources, which are much easier to access now that most everything is on the internet, but it's still more time consuming than most people are going to be able to commit to. Which is maybe why everything is such a mess. It seems like we need journalists with an opinion but not a party.

lucideer 8y ago

This is a pretty pointless and contentless article. As others have pointed out, it's attacking a strawman, so the point isn't even relevant. But even if it were, what's the conclusion? There's a graph of people's trust in media, and some quotes from DDG's marketing—neither of which seem relevant to the central point. > are filter bubbles really the problem here? Danny Sullivan [...] argues fairly persuasively that they’re not because even DuckDuckGo users see different results. What is this sentence? Argues conclusively what? If anything, it supports the thesis that they exist (by this article's awkward definition), since they also pervade even DDG.

joncrane 8y ago

Ironically, Pandora's whole point is to create the musical equivalent of filter bubbles, and it's really cool.

chrisco255 8y ago
Yeah, I use Pandora when I want repetition and I use Spotify to discover new music or see what my friends are listening to.

jorgesborges 8y ago

This is just tangential personal reflection but I feel like at every stage in my life I've been in some kind of bubble. Bubbles come and go depending on my environment and life experience. Being situated on a university campus, mostly insulated from the concerns of the real world and free to exercise the curiosities of youth -- that was probably my first big bubble. I had no access to or understanding of the concerns of most people working to make a living or raising families. Similarly I can think of periods of time when I was in a bad relationship, or stuck at a menial job. My day-to-day experience constitutes a filter bubble, and I don't even think it's good or bad. I feel like the media bubbles under discussion are symptomatic of a larger cultural malady in which our experience, our own personal bubbles, are so confused and impoverished that we jump at any screen or soundbite just to have some medium through which to experience anything.

fouc 8y ago

The author seems to miss the point of filter bubbles. There's a known cognitive bias where people tend to seek out information that mainly validates their existing views. Filter bubbles become a major enabler of that, allowing them to develop horse blinders to reality. Filter bubbles can lead people down into more extremist views that don't mesh with reality, rather than giving them exposure to counterarguments and allowing them to develop a more well-rounded view.

Johnny555 8y ago

Just because people may visit other news sources, they can still be in a Facebook filter bubble where everyone in their newsfeed thinks just like them. At least, that's how my facebook newsfeed looks, most of my Facebook friends/family have similar political views as me, so my news feed is full of stories and comments backing up my own political views. So even if I read opposing viewpoints in other news sites, my newsfeed still reinforces that those opposing viewpoints are invalid, and it makes it seem like everyone agrees with me.

colordrops 8y ago

An anecdote: When Bush Sr. died, I saw ~30 different comments and tweets about how sick they were of the constant barrage of praise for whom they surmised to be a war criminal, and yet I did not see one single bit of positive words spoken about him. It was splash of cold water awakening me to the depth of my filter bubble.

nyolfen 8y ago
i liked douthat’s editorial even without any particular personal sentimentality for wasps: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/opinion/george-bush-wasps.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/opinion/george-bush-wasps...
mcv 8y ago
In the Google+ RPG community, every once in a while I see people complain about asshats, attacks, harassment, etc. I rarely see the original behaviour that people complain about. I tend to see that as a sign that I've trimmed my circles well. Part of the problem here is of course the tendency of people to be assholes to people they tend to see as THEM, as the people who are causing whatever they believe is a problem. Most people don't like being exposed to abuse, so we close ourselves off from it, creating a safe space for ourselves, but also a filter bubble. Filter bubbles would be less of a problem if we could be nicer to each other, but that seems unlikely in an age of polarisation, vilification, paranoia, and a US president who has turned insults and mockery into the new standard.

chrisco255 8y ago

In my experience, few people are NOT trapped in a filter bubble. If you've ever moved from a conservative area to a liberal area of the country, or vice versa, you'll feel this in your interactions with people. In modern politics, it's far more difficult to find people who are able to constructively engage with both sides than it is to find blatant partisans. Simple test for this is to ask some one to describe the positions of the other party and why they feel the way they do without using any disparaging or cynical terms. Fun experiment, I invite you to try it.

MrQuincle 8y ago
Your approach sounds like a confrontational approach. In "The culture map" it is described that the US culture is far less confrontational than e.g. France. It might be difficult to engage in a discussion without disclaimers such as "let me play devil's advocate". As in this book is explained, an American was wondering why the French at the dinner table were laughing together after a heated discussion on a topic short before. A discussion is not a personal attack. However, in the US it is quicker felt this way. Hence, that people are not trapped in filter bubbles should not be countered by an argument based on a personal confrontational approach about how constructively they engage in political discussions.
- honestoHeminway 8y ago
  In the cult of the individual, any confrontation is heresy. To be tortured for the comon good in the public plaza, by having your opinion attacked, that is pure evil. Rather fan out and form a thousand little new countries, within the country, declaring independence from washington or the rust-belt.
- lanevorockz 8y ago
  French are not heavy users of social media. It is social media and agenda driven journalism that creates the polarisation.
  - sharemywin 8y ago

kijin 8y ago

> Few people are in complete filter bubbles in which they only consume, say, Fox News Sure, if you only want to count "complete" filter bubbles in which 100% of your search results come from a single source. Averaged over millions of people and billions of searches, however, even a 10% bias is likely to have a measurable effect. People don't get pushed over to one side of a partisan issue overnight. Like a pollutant in your drinking water, it takes a long time of constant exposure to unbalanced news for the subtle biases to seep into your brain and change how you see the world.

mrweasel 8y ago
Also one would assume that placing you 100% in one "bubble" would be bad for business. Sites wants to see if you need/can be pushed into yet unknown areas of interest. But sure, no one is actually trapped in a filter bubble. If you're aware that you're in a bubble, then it because much easier to escape. The problem is that most people aren't aware that they aren't seen all sides of an issue.

freeflight 8y ago

I wonder how one would go about actually quantifying any of this? The article tries to use two different studies to do this, but this approach seems flawed for the very simple reason that participants are not the same across both studies. Imho this whole problem is very comparable to being biased in general. We are all biased in some way or another and I like to think most of us are aware of this reality. But being aware of it does not simply translate to being aware of the full extent of the biases or lead to an outcome where the bias is "negated", if it is as easy as that, then barely anybody should be biased. In a way, it's like trying to define what goes on inside a blind spot, which by definition, is kinda impossible: If you'd be aware of your blind spot, it wouldn't be a blind spot anymore. I see the same problem with "filter bubbles", which in a way are just systemic biases very comparable how different social circles have different Overton windows. Most of these seem not to be forced upon people but are rather consequences of choices made based on personal biases/the Overton window often heavily influenced by in ones peer groups. While one might be aware of these choices, and how one reasoned them, that does not entail knowledge about the reality of other, maybe equally valid, choices. In that context, a lot of this feels more like a philosophical problem than an actual social one. People will, for the most part, rationalize their own choices as the "most valid ones". If they wouldn't, then they wouldn't have made those choices because only very few people make irrational choices on purpose for the sake of acting irrational.

bad_user 8y ago
>> “The article tries to use two different studies to do this, but this approach seems flawed for the very simple reason that participants are not the same across both studies.” That’s not a valid requirement. In fact using the same participants in multiple studies biases the results.

karmasimida 8y ago

For self-victimization, apparently.

coldtea 8y ago

>We’re not trapped in filter bubbles, but we like to act as if we are. Few people are in complete filter bubbles in which they only consume, say, Fox News, Matt Grossmann writes in a new report for Knight That's irrelevant. It's enough that their biases are regularly reinforced by the sources they follow (something modern social media and news aggregators make extremely easy), they don't have to "only consume" their side of the story.

im3w1l 8y ago

In my experience the same people that complain about filter bubbles also want offensive content gone. It seems the underlying motivation is just "show more of my beliefs less of theirs".

fareesh 8y ago

In my experience there are some good tests for this on various noteworthy political events in recent times. For example if you think that President Trump gave a press conference in which he referred to neo Nazis as very fine people, you are in a bubble because the context and quote are the exact opposite which he later clarifies when asked by the reporter, saying "I'm not talking about the Neo Nazis". If you believe that Hillary Clinton sold 20% of the USA's uranium to Russia in exchange for donations then you are in a bubble because that characterization is missing several key pieces of information. People treat future events based on what they have preconceived in these erroneous ways. The media distorts something with a tiny grain of truth into a narrative, and that narrative is what remains as a criteria for filtering future information. When you interact with ideologically entrenched folks, you can easily poke holes using examples like this. If they are reasonable they will recognize what has happened to them. If not reasonable, there will be cognitive dissonance and excuses as to why their belief is still right. The latter are not worth engaging with further because it's an uphill battle that will likely yield no progress. Media organizations like CNN and Fox News have become brazen in this regard. Recently CNN had a participant on a panel masquerading as a Trump voter, who was revealed to have a YouTube channel that espoused the exact opposite view. On a similar panel, key parts of answers on voter fraud were edited out of the final broadcast to make the respondent look uninformed, when they had, in fact, answered the question citing sources and narrating a great deal of information. Market forces have moved the keepers of the "Gated institutional narrative" further towards the new clickbait, ideological, tabloid brand of journalism, and we are all worse off for it.

newsgremlin 8y ago

Perhaps not entirely, but do filter bubbles become an issue when an individual is isolated in the same community for most of their life? I've slowly traveled outwards from my hometown of 2000~ people to now living in a city of 300k+, I've been to a few places between then and now but while my internet bubble has always been there, it hasn't consumed me.

codeulike 8y ago

Niemanlab seem a bit confused here. People have _always_ been in self-created filter bubbles - its called Confirmation Bias. The concern with Google and Facebook and YouTube is that they are now re-inforcing that confirmation bias even more. NiemanLab cite a few studies here but them seem to be focusing on Google Search Results whereas things like Facebook Walls and the way YouTube recommends 'extreme' points of view on any given topic are also of concern. Essentially a huge part of the internet is now optimising for clicks, which means targeted clickbait and sensationalism will always crowd out reasoned argument.

lostmyoldone 8y ago
Yeah, they seem to missing the point completely. The problem, which is hopefully well known, but bears repeating is that our brain learns the structure of the world by repetition and exposure, and typically seem to be quite unbiased apart from this exposure. Hence, a continuous over-abundance of content that caters to our biases will strongly affect our behavior, often even when we consciously think it's garbage. It is why and how advertising works, and probably why averages of peoples faces are seen as more beautiful than any of the faces in the mix. In sensor tasks, the vision system ( amongst other ) can be shown to be close to Bayesian perfect in how it recovers information from sensory input, which should give pause to any argument - as those in the article - that only complete filter bubbles should be seen as such. Even a partial filter bubble could, and anecdotally does, sometimes completely shortcut this information recovery from noisy data, as the basic "assumption" of the brain would have to be that the environment doesn't lie. Which in a bubble is no longer true. If we were adept at living in a world that lies to us, I imagine neuropathologies that create auditory hallucinations of various forms would not be even remotely as problematic as they are. But assuming a purely statistical interpretation of the environment, it's easy to see that eg a persistent voice in your head is going to cause serious issues over time. If you boil it all down, that is what a filter bubble becomes, a voice persistently telling lie about how the world looks and works, on average. This in turn can lead to radicalization, distrust, paranoia, and other forms of unhealthy thought patterns, as similar mechanisms does when "statistical lies" are generated internally by our minds.

thinkingemote 8y ago

I am not sure what I did with my filter bubble. Did I make it stronger or weaker, larger or smaller? The polarisation on twitter and Facebook after Brexit and the two years before and after the US election saw the losing tribe write off the other half as evil, selfish, needing to be re-educated, that democracy was over and a strong left hand was needed and that the free press needed regulation. These were views by some of you, CTO level educated SV technologists. I pointed out that the opposition wasn't evil, democracy was still valid, and mainly i pointed out how they were blinkered. Some people took it personally. Now they are not in my filter bubble. Worth saying that the winning tribalism was not in my filter bubble at any point. My bubble has less tribalism than before but it's also less large.

nickthemagicman 8y ago
How does one know when they're in a filter bubble?

jccalhoun 8y ago

This article doesn't really have a lot of meat to it. Despite that, I am very skeptical of the filter bubble idea and especially as it relates to customized internet search results. I found Eli Pariser's book to be very unconvincing. It is full of qualifiers like "might," "could," and "may" and few hard facts. To a degree we have always been in some kind of bubble because we aren't omniscient. Before electronic media, our knowledge of things outside our immediate circle was very limited. Was that a filter bubble? During the heyday of newspapers when a city had multiple newspapers there would be explicitly liberal and conservative newspapers (growing up my hometown newspaper was the Republican!) I feel like now I know a lot more about people who disagree with me than I ever did. I may not understand them but I know that Trump supporters, flat earthers, creationists, anti-vaxers, and people who care about sports all exist.

OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago

fuck this attempt at creating self-doubt

rwj 8y ago

Beyond the filter bubble, I've noticed that a lot media spends most of their time in personal attacks, and very little time discussing the substance of any issue. Even when the discussion actually contains any substance, authors cannot refrain from poisoning the well. It isn't Person A believes ..., and Person B points to research ..., it is Left-wing ideologue idiot Person A believes crazy idea ...and well-respected patriot Person B point to research ... Both left and right partisan authors are using this style. I raise this point in a discussion about filter bubbles since I'm suspect the two aspects are self-reinforcing.

kristianc 8y ago

There's an interesting phenomenon here in the UK where a lot of the quality journalism on the right is behind a paywall, whereas a lot of the quality journalism on the left is ad-funded and freely available. I can see that being a potential amplifier of 'filter bubbles'.

thecanman 8y ago
Are your "Rights" and "Lefts" the same as ours in the US? I think it can all vary, but it would provide interesting context. Is the UK's right more closely aligned with the House of Lords or the like?
- kristianc 8y ago
  They’re fairly similar - though the whole political spectrum is shifted to the left. The British Conservative Party is pro free market and low tax but socially liberal, with an Atlanticist foreign policy, and is in favor of single payer health care. The Labour Party is pro government intervention, state planning and redistributive taxes, less sceptical about regulation and has greater historic ties with Europe than with the US. It’s long described itself as a socialist party. The House of Lords is said to be a house of experts who have been chosen because of their specialist knowledge. Because it is unelected and made up of political appointees, it’s composition can change over time. There are however limits to what the Lords can actually do to block legislation, so it differs from the Senate. Bills can only be proposed in the House of Commons (so not like the US where either house can propose).