Fighting Against Proprietary Software Developers for the Rights of Filtering Information – The Reflection on the “Filter Bubble” Effect Brought About by the Algorithm

Thanks to the popularized use of the Internet, we have all been benefited that it has been unprecedentedly convenient to query for information we need via all kinds of websites, forums, and social media. We no longer need to subscribe to the newspaper or rush to the libraries around to do such thing.

Everything in the world has its own two sides, however. The information providers today, such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple News, etc., is unquestionably bringing us the convenience to look for the information we need. But at the same time, they are also threatening our rights to filter information by using algorithms.

Those big businesses – Google, Twitter, Meta, Apple, with no exception, has all equipped the recommendation features powered by algorithms. This let their users to gain the information they are interested in without the effort to search for. However, at the same time the recommendation features are taking away the users’ freedom of filtering their information, and bringing about the effect of the “filter bubbles.”

A filter bubble is a state of intellectual or ideological isolation that may result from algorithms feeding us information we agree with, based on our past behaviour and search history. It’s a pretty popular term that was coined by Internet activist Eli Pariser, who wrote about a book about it. Social media combines self-selected personalisation with pre-selected personalisation. We also know that people choose to follow certain news organisations and not to follow others. But it is also possible that algorithms might be hiding news from people which they’re not interested in or from outlets they don’t particularly like. People have a limited amount of time, so the decisions made by algorithms are going to affect what people see when they’re using Facebook.

Today, the popular news readers we use, including Google News, Apple News, etc., are mostly proprietary software, which is malicious and does not respect its users’ freedom and the community. With proprietary software, the program controls the users, and some other entity (the developer or “owner”) controls the program. So the proprietary program gives its developer power over its users. That is unjust in itself; moreover, it tempts the developer to mistreat the users in other ways.

To promote the use of their proprietary apps, those evils get their services equipped with algorithms-powered recommendation features, increasing the number of the users of their services and maximizing their profits by hurting their users’ essential freedoms of software and rights to filtering information. We must fight against that injustice now.

First, we should insist on free (libre) software and reject all that proprietary evils. Reject algorithms-powered recommendation, valuing your software freedom, privacy, and your rights of information filtering.

Second, use a proper way to search for information. Replace Google with something respect your privacy, like DuckDuckGo, StartPage, MetaGer or Ecosia Search. They all respect your software freedom, privacy and your right of information filtering. Replace Google News and Apple News with a free software news reader powered by RSS, such as Feeder for phones and Liferea for PCs. Subscribe to some RSS feeds you like, like TechChurch, It’s FOSS, and Lifehacker.

We have all been benefited by the convenience of finding information but hurt by the effect of the “filter bubble”. It’s time for a change – for our rights to filter information, for the security of our private information, and the software freedoms we deserve.