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  • Mark Zuckerberg,

  • a journalist was asking him a question about the news feed.

  • And the journalist was asking him,

  • "Why is this so important?"

  • And Zuckerberg said,

  • "A squirrel dying in your front yard

  • may be more relevant to your interests right now

  • than people dying in Africa."

  • And I want to talk about

  • what a Web based on that idea of relevance might look like.

  • So when I was growing up

  • in a really rural area in Maine,

  • the Internet meant something very different to me.

  • It meant a connection to the world.

  • It meant something that would connect us all together.

  • And I was sure that it was going to be great for democracy

  • and for our society.

  • But there's this shift

  • in how information is flowing online,

  • and it's invisible.

  • And if we don't pay attention to it,

  • it could be a real problem.

  • So I first noticed this in a place I spend a lot of time --

  • my Facebook page.

  • I'm progressive, politically -- big surprise --

  • but I've always gone out of my way to meet conservatives.

  • I like hearing what they're thinking about;

  • I like seeing what they link to;

  • I like learning a thing or two.

  • And so I was surprised when I noticed one day

  • that the conservatives had disappeared from my Facebook feed.

  • And what it turned out was going on

  • was that Facebook was looking at which links I clicked on,

  • and it was noticing that, actually,

  • I was clicking more on my liberal friends' links

  • than on my conservative friends' links.

  • And without consulting me about it,

  • it had edited them out.

  • They disappeared.

  • So Facebook isn't the only place

  • that's doing this kind of invisible, algorithmic

  • editing of the Web.

  • Google's doing it too.

  • If I search for something, and you search for something,

  • even right now at the very same time,

  • we may get very different search results.

  • Even if you're logged out, one engineer told me,

  • there are 57 signals

  • that Google looks at --

  • everything from what kind of computer you're on

  • to what kind of browser you're using

  • to where you're located --

  • that it uses to personally tailor your query results.

  • Think about it for a second:

  • there is no standard Google anymore.

  • And you know, the funny thing about this is that it's hard to see.

  • You can't see how different your search results are

  • from anyone else's.

  • But a couple of weeks ago,

  • I asked a bunch of friends to Google "Egypt"

  • and to send me screen shots of what they got.

  • So here's my friend Scott's screen shot.

  • And here's my friend Daniel's screen shot.

  • When you put them side-by-side,

  • you don't even have to read the links

  • to see how different these two pages are.

  • But when you do read the links,

  • it's really quite remarkable.

  • Daniel didn't get anything about the protests in Egypt at all

  • in his first page of Google results.

  • Scott's results were full of them.

  • And this was the big story of the day at that time.

  • That's how different these results are becoming.

  • So it's not just Google and Facebook either.

  • This is something that's sweeping the Web.

  • There are a whole host of companies that are doing this kind of personalization.

  • Yahoo News, the biggest news site on the Internet,

  • is now personalized -- different people get different things.

  • Huffington Post, the Washington Post, the New York Times --

  • all flirting with personalization in various ways.

  • And this moves us very quickly

  • toward a world in which

  • the Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see,

  • but not necessarily what we need to see.

  • As Eric Schmidt said,

  • "It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something

  • that has not in some sense

  • been tailored for them."

  • So I do think this is a problem.

  • And I think, if you take all of these filters together,

  • you take all these algorithms,

  • you get what I call a filter bubble.

  • And your filter bubble is your own personal

  • unique universe of information

  • that you live in online.

  • And what's in your filter bubble

  • depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do.

  • But the thing is that you don't decide what gets in.

  • And more importantly,

  • you don't actually see what gets edited out.

  • So one of the problems with the filter bubble

  • was discovered by some researchers at Netflix.

  • And they were looking at the Netflix queues, and they noticed something kind of funny

  • that a lot of us probably have noticed,

  • which is there are some movies

  • that just sort of zip right up and out to our houses.

  • They enter the queue, they just zip right out.

  • So "Iron Man" zips right out,

  • and "Waiting for Superman"

  • can wait for a really long time.

  • What they discovered

  • was that in our Netflix queues

  • there's this epic struggle going on

  • between our future aspirational selves

  • and our more impulsive present selves.

  • You know we all want to be someone

  • who has watched "Rashomon,"

  • but right now

  • we want to watch "Ace Ventura" for the fourth time.

  • (Laughter)

  • So the best editing gives us a bit of both.

  • It gives us a little bit of Justin Bieber

  • and a little bit of Afghanistan.

  • It gives us some information vegetables,

  • it gives us some information dessert.

  • And the challenge with these kinds of algorithmic filters,

  • these personalized filters,

  • is that, because they're mainly looking

  • at what you click on first,

  • it can throw off that balance.

  • And instead of a balanced information diet,

  • you can end up surrounded

  • by information junk food.

  • What this suggests

  • is actually that we may have the story about the Internet wrong.

  • In a broadcast society --

  • this is how the founding mythology goes --

  • in a broadcast society,

  • there were these gatekeepers, the editors,

  • and they controlled the flows of information.

  • And along came the Internet and it swept them out of the way,

  • and it allowed all of us to connect together,

  • and it was awesome.

  • But that's not actually what's happening right now.

  • What we're seeing is more of a passing of the torch

  • from human gatekeepers

  • to algorithmic ones.

  • And the thing is that the algorithms

  • don't yet have the kind of embedded ethics

  • that the editors did.

  • So if algorithms are going to curate the world for us,

  • if they're going to decide what we get to see and what we don't get to see,

  • then we need to make sure

  • that they're not just keyed to relevance.

  • We need to make sure that they also show us things

  • that are uncomfortable or challenging or important --

  • this is what TED does --

  • other points of view.

  • And the thing is we've actually been here before

  • as a society.

  • In 1915, it's not like newspapers were sweating a lot

  • about their civic responsibilities.

  • Then people noticed

  • that they were doing something really important.

  • That, in fact, you couldn't have

  • a functioning democracy

  • if citizens didn't get a good flow of information.

  • That the newspapers were critical, because they were acting as the filter,

  • and then journalistic ethics developed.

  • It wasn't perfect,

  • but it got us through the last century.

  • And so now,

  • we're kind of back in 1915 on the Web.

  • And we need the new gatekeepers

  • to encode that kind of responsibility

  • into the code that they're writing.

  • I know that there are a lot of people here from Facebook and from Google --

  • Larry and Sergey --

  • people who have helped build the Web as it is,

  • and I'm grateful for that.

  • But we really need you to make sure

  • that these algorithms have encoded in them

  • a sense of the public life, a sense of civic responsibility.

  • We need you to make sure that they're transparent enough

  • that we can see what the rules are

  • that determine what gets through our filters.

  • And we need you to give us some control,

  • so that we can decide

  • what gets through and what doesn't.

  • Because I think

  • we really need the Internet to be that thing

  • that we all dreamed of it being.

  • We need it to connect us all together.

  • We need it to introduce us to new ideas

  • and new people and different perspectives.

  • And it's not going to do that

  • if it leaves us all isolated in a Web of one.

  • Thank you.

  • (Applause)

Mark Zuckerberg,

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