Don't Let the Algorithms Trap You — Myron Eby — Ep. 170

In this episode, we discuss the Internet and how it influences our view of the world, truth, and bias.

The modern Internet is, uh, pretty complicated, and one of the things that we want to keep in mind is it's not where we just go to find content we look for. There's a lot more going on in the architecture behind the scenes. Um, could you unpack—it's extremely broad—but could you unpack some of what that is? And I don't know, what you could almost call like manipulation of how certain websites work, um, behind the scenes. I think one of the first things that will bring some clarity to this is thinking of the Internet and asking the question: how is the Internet sustained? What is keeping the Internet going? It's not free to run the Internet, so what—what is paying the bills for these computers that are storing our photos or storing our music or, um, connecting us with friends on social media or whatever?

Um, how are those companies making money? I think a summary of what's happening is the Internet is run on an attention economy. The Internet is an attention economy. Companies are getting paid to hold your attention. Why does your social media feed not have a next page button at the bottom? It just endlessly scrolls and keeps loading things. They want it to be as friction-free as possible. You just keep watching things, and the longer you're there, the more ads you see, the more money they make.

And another thing that I think is important for people to realize is that if you're not paying for the service, if you're not paying for the product, you are the product. And it's good to keep that in mind. I don't think a lot of people think about it that way. It's just, oh, Facebook is free. I'm not just dissing Facebook, but that's a big example we could use here.

Who pays Facebook to maintain all their services and make so you can call a friend or chat with a friend? Like, when's the last time you paid for something on Facebook? I mean, unless it was something that you bought on Marketplace, probably not. So how is Facebook making money? If you're not paying them, I'm not paying them. It's advertisers that are paying them. Advertisers are their customers. They're the ones that are paying the bills at Facebook, and advertisers are paying to get access to us and our attention.

So within that, there's a lot of manipulation, or there's a lot of desire on those companies, and really a lot of obligation from a shareholder standpoint of these public companies to keep you there as long as possible. It's easy to think, oh, I'm just checking my feed for 10 minutes to see what my friends are doing.

But it's not just a neutral experience. There are things going on in the background that are likely subconscious, if even that, that are subtly influencing you, and what you see there is not just a chronological feed or not just a perfect feed of the world. It's handpicked for you and selected for you, and I don't think a lot of people fully understand that. I think the part that really sticks out, and we were talking about this a little before—before we turned the cameras on, but basically the Internet not being neutral, which is what you just said, or like, I think you'd use the word like it has a bend to it or almost an agenda, which really makes sense.

You know, these companies have to sustain themselves, you know, so that makes them inherently not neutral, you know. It's not like this place where you go and just retrieve factually correct information that is always the same every single day. They have to keep it refreshing and constantly keep them—keep you using that service. The services are self-serving.

You think that you're going to a news site to gain news and read the latest. And while that's true, that site that's serving up that content has an agenda. They need to pay their bills, and so they are looking maybe at your demographic, maybe at your age range, maybe where you're living, and serving you these top five articles based on what it thinks you're going to like, because you're going to spend more time there and see more ads. They're going to make more money. They're going to show you five other ones. So the service is not just, oh yeah, I'm coming here to access facts, and I'm pulling back out, and everybody else saw those same five stories.

There's another agenda on the other side of your screen. I know this sounds dark, but it's true. Dark and sad, yes. No, I think you said it well. For people in my age group and older and probably some younger, if we wanted information, what do we have? In our home, it was the daily newspaper from the local area.

And you think about that, that content was the same for everybody. Yeah. Same to every home. If I wanted to research something, it was books at the library. It was the World Book Encyclopedia set. It was printed material. It's just the same. And I think that for many of us in my generation, that's maybe been a mindset that's a little difficult to overcome. You go to the Internet, and we enter it with that mindset of, oh, it's just the same for everybody when it's not. It's fascinating what they do. It's amazing what they do technologically, and yet we are their—we are their subject. The people using that service, we're the ones that feed them the data.

So that's really interesting you mentioned the generational thing, because actually one of the things that sparked this episode was a comment we got from one of our listeners through our Patreon page. I'm just going to read his comment because I think it kind of connects with what you said there. So this is what he says. Speaking of an age group, how some of our older ones are innocently and obliviously using the Internet for all kinds of things, things not necessarily evil, but I fear we are being—I believe this is hypo—subtly influenced by the culture more than we realize, and this exposure has the potential to cause us to lose our salt, referring to, yeah, our influence on society, or even a shift to us more and more towards becoming a church culture that is no longer separate or non-assimilated, but is rather influencing us towards a church culture that will look more and more like our evangelical friends.

Some of our older people are being swallowed up with the—he uses quotes here—with innocently using the Internet. I guess I hadn't really thought of that before, the cultural difference of how you all would have received information half, you know, 20, 30, 40 years ago compared to how it is now. Could you respond to this comment? Do you think he's on something there? I would probably frame it even differently than just evangelical America. I think it—the Internet, if we're not intentional about the way and aware of what it's doing to us, I think it's pushing us into a secular Western mentality.

And I see that happening in the political realm, maybe more than even some other areas. I think, you know, we're aware of, okay, we see an ad for style address. I can't do that. You know, that wouldn't fit me. But there's things that happen in our minds and the way we think that I think he is on to something there that we are getting shaped by the type of information coming in, and we're accepting some things as fact when it may or may not be so.

It appears to you to be fact. You feel it's fact because this is what you're seeing in your newsfeed or where you're reading every day. But then I'm reading something from the opposite standpoint, and I feel very strongly that that is factual, and that's the way the world is, and that's what other people are seeing. And so I just—I can't understand where you're coming from. And I think that's part of what's driven this increasing polarization, not only in political things, but in a lot of areas of life. People think that their version—they're peering out at the online world through their window that's colored a certain way.

And they think that's the same experience everybody else is having. And all of a sudden, you've got everybody with all these other viewpoints and vantage points. They believe they're just as right as you are. And so, yeah, why don't you get it? Why don't you get it? Like, the way I'm looking at it is clearly right.

And it takes humility to recognize, okay, maybe they do have something to say, but I think it becomes increasingly difficult to listen to those other viewpoints when everything else that you're looking at and seeing and taking in is lining up with the worldview that you have. Like, this is a very simple example of this, but I'd seen somewhere they were doing some research, and they had two different—a guy and a lady on the research team switched their logins for their TikTok accounts just to see what would come up. And it was wild because TikTok is a service that's known to be pretty addictive and really good at conjuring up stuff that they think you'll be interested in.

And yeah, it was kind of eye-opening because the feeds were so radically different tailored to that specific person that when someone else looked at it, it was like, well, it doesn't even fit. Anyway, yeah, it's just kind of—I guess it's a little surprising because there's so much going on there underneath that we don't sense because it's so seamlessly done, I guess, by the architecture of how these things are built. Now, going back to what Calvin was saying in his question here, I'd be interested in hearing y'all respond specifically to especially the older generation, you know, I don't know, Generation X and the boomers, etc., and how they could be equipped for navigating the Internet, especially because, as you were saying, with coming from a different—growing up in a totally different environment, you're going to be approaching the Internet quite differently.

What are some—I'm not even sure how to frame it, but like how do we approach that? Because that could be a real challenge, even just from a generational perspective. This whole thing has been somewhat frustrating to me because one of the things that highlighted some of these differences that we're talking about, how you just get fed things, is when I—and I don't even remember the topic—but when I would research certain things that I cared about and I would be looking for information, I found that you could find opposite opinions online on pretty much any given topic by people who have credentials, by people who ought to know, and they come out at opposite opinions. If all you ever see is one of them, you would have no reason to disbelieve the other.

So the frustration for me came in, how do I know who to believe? How do I even know what's true? I think there's a healthy skepticism that we ought to have with pretty much any information that comes in from the World Wide Web portal, just because it's so broad, anybody can put anything out there. Now, given there, we have to be gracious.

I know of people personally who I would consider experts in their field. They're highly respected, and they have different opinions on the same topic. So even there, and this is real life, they see different nuances. So some of that is just navigating our way through life. But when you open it up to a general search, you know, it's just broad. And then realizing, okay, they're feeding me things based on their algorithms and things that they think are going to fit me. And it can be really hard to break out of that bubble. And I've had some friends; it feels like they never quite get out of it because you know that there's other things out there, but all you ever hear from them is this little perspective.

In a practical sense, for me, that's one of the things we have to do is remember that that is what's being fed to us and that you literally will find anything on the Internet. And so it's a matter of where you're looking or what you get shown. So just understanding that piece, maybe that's not very practical, but I think in a mindset, we have to make that practical in order to look at this topic well.

Yeah, I think we need a healthy skepticism of the things that we see on the Internet. You know, thinking of times past and even presently where somebody publishes a book, that book is going through an editorial process, it's going through a review process before it gets published. So hopefully there's some level of credibility and some reliability to the information that's in it.

Well, now anybody can publish a blog post. So the Internet has created this very democratic information sharing age where it's very easy to share information online. I think we tend to view information that's on a web page, a blog post, often with the same authority as we do a well-researched and vetted book.

And I don't think that should be the case, but it's easy to do because they're both written down text. And then once you add in the audio-visual aspect of things, it becomes even more convincing because if somebody's portraying confidence, somebody is talking smoothly, and it's just easy to believe what they're saying without truly checking into what is happening. So I think a practical takeaway is just to be skeptical of what you read on the Internet, and that can be difficult. It can be exhausting, and it's easy to let your guard down.

But I think some of the things that people are falling to are really a result of us not thinking critically. To try to circle this around and package it up nicely because these things could feel very dark or sad or, yeah, so to make it practical, someone once said, "Don't judge another person until you've spent an hour in his newsfeed," which I think is an interesting way of saying it.

But really, realistically, talk of ways, how can we resist the polarization that we see in a time when many are being driven towards polarization because the Internet just kind of keeps feeding them what they already want to see? And what are some practical ways that we can—I don't know what the right word is—maybe take back control of some of these things and not let the Internet just kind of passively happen to us? What's something practical we can do? One of the things that I think you brought out earlier that's really important to remember, and this is not a practical answer, but I'll hopefully get there, is back when you were growing up in the '60s, there were, what, three TV stations?

Probably. Like, it was less than a handful. And so you saw what you saw, what everybody else saw on the evening news or whatever. Think of it today where everybody tunes in for the Super Bowl on a Sunday afternoon. Like, most of a nation is watching the same thing live. And so everybody's experience is very similar. So that's the way it used to be. That's not the way it is now. The flood of information on the Internet has created a state where you can't consume everything. And so these services are tailoring information to you. And that's not inherently problematic. But again, there's this agenda that factors in that makes it problematic. And so I think remembering what you're seeing online is different from what the billions of other people are seeing on their device.

It's not just three stations with maybe slightly differing views, but you pretty much know what everybody has seen the night before on the news or listened to on the radio. Everybody's rendition of the story is truly different. There's a different nuance for each person.

And so I think we need to be mindful of that and have an openness to say, "Okay, well, maybe what I'm being fed is not actually truly representative of the world and how it truly is." At the same time, I think there are practical steps that we can take to choose our sources of information to limit the impact of algorithms on our lives. I think one of those is going directly to a news source instead of, you know, loading up Google News or Apple News on your device. Like, go directly to a website that you've researched and you feel does a good balanced job of reporting and go directly to that site. Another option that I utilize is what we call an RSS reader, similar to a podcast where you usually don't go and look for an individual podcast.

You open a podcast app and the podcast that you subscribe to, new episodes automatically show up. The same is available for the Internet. So instead of going to this site and this site and this site, or going to Google or Facebook for newsfeeds, you can subscribe directly to those sites and then articles show up in the order that they're published, and you can go through and read them there. So that's a practical way of distancing yourself from the algorithms and from ads a lot of times. So it can be a cleaner Internet experience. So algorithms are very powerful. We often forget that on the other side of our screen is billions of dollars' worth of computing power that's crunching data to show us the next thing in our scrolling feed.

We don't think about that, but it's—I mean, Facebook is building another data center out close to Nashville right now. It's $800 million. So you think about all those computers working together to crunch information to show us the next thing as we scroll up on our device. And that's really powerful. And in a lot of ways, I don't feel like our human minds are equipped to handle that very well. And so I think finding ways of removing ourselves is important. I think another practical aspect is paying for services. The Internet's driven on a tension economy where if you're not paying for it, you are the product, and your eyeballs, the advertising time that's on a site is what's paying the bills if you're not paying for a service.

And so choosing a service and paying for quality content, quality services, yeah, it's more expensive than something free, obviously. But I think there's a lot of value in that. Again, it comes back to this intentionality thing that we've talked about before. Yeah. Sorry, I've gone on long enough. You're fine. That's good. I like what you said on the practical side there. For me, there's another piece that—here again, this is mindset practical more than technology practical. But mindset practical is remembering that there are going to be other people with different perspectives. And while I may really think I'm right, I think there's a—it's easy for us to fall into a kind of an arrogant mode where I've researched this more, I've figured this one out, and I know.

And I get in this mode where, because I know, everybody else is wrong. And I think if we can just pull back from that and recognize that, you know, I don't have a monopoly on intelligence or researchability or whatever, and realize that other people are going to have the same thing. You mentioned the three TV primary stations. And incidentally, I don't think any of us grew up in homes with televisions, but that was there. And it's actually one of the things that drove where we're at is because those three kind of had a monopoly on information. And as the Internet became available, I remember in the late '80s when certain radio broadcasts became more popular, talk radio became popular, talk show hosts multiplied.

Now, all of a sudden, you had this counter media that was kind of reacting to those big three. And so what's happened from there is it's just exploded out into this information age where we have absolutely anything out there. So, you know, whether what those three fed you were right back in the, you know, 50, 40, 50, 60 years ago, they did tend to be more on the same page. And so now we get this big explosion. So I would just encourage, you know, a practical thing I would think in information, like you said, is go to sources. And I would say when you're researching an idea, even go beyond just reading articles. If it's depending what it is, you may actually want to go to source data and look for yourself because people look at source data and they interpret that in different ways.

You know, in the medical field, somebody may look at a blood test or, you know, whatever test is coming back, and you'll end up with doctors having different opinions looking at the same data. I think we can do some of that same thing with information if we really care about it. Remember that people are interpreting data.

And if we can go to data sources, we can maybe avoid some of that interpretation. And there again, with humility, it doesn't mean I'm knowledgeable enough to interpret it well myself, but if I can look at it, maybe I will get a sense of understanding. I think the quote that you read there about spending an hour in somebody's newsfeed, it's great because we all do get fed that. You get fed that, you know, unless you're doing things to avoid it. Everybody gets fed that. If we just remember that one thing, I think the humility that comes along with some of our discussions could be really helpful.

Yeah, I feel like there's a lot with this that could look kind of bleak, but at the same time, learning systems and tools to make this work because these are powerful tools if we know how to use them well instead of us being the product, like you say.

Yeah, this is really good. Anything else either of you would like to add? That was the last question I had on the list. I think one other practical thing that we maybe could mention here is thinking about these devices as tools. I think we view them as tools a lot of times, but things like push notifications and other things that kind of wake up our devices or try to pull our attention into something, at that point, it's no longer a tool.

It's actually a taskmaster. You know, if you have a chainsaw sitting outside, that chainsaw is just going to sit there until you need to pick it up and cut down a tree. Like, it's not doing anything. It's not demanding a single thing of you. Our devices, usually, unless we've been very intentional about it, are not just sitting there waiting for us to pick them up. They're vying for our attention. Oh, here's a badge icon. Here's a push notification.

And these push notifications often are not just random. There's a reason you might get a push notification on Facebook here because you haven't been on Facebook for seven hours. Like, you haven't been seen in a while, so here's a little nudge, and maybe they'll get you back on. It's very insidious. And I'm coming across kind of pessimistic, maybe, but I think it's a realistic thing to be mindful of. That push notification was not mere coincidence.

Like, there was something on the other end that pushed that, that pushed that at a certain time. There was something on the other side of the screen being intentional. That's right. And we need to be intentional back at them. That's right. You're intentional about pushing back. I like that. One resource I would maybe throw out there, not necessarily fully endorsing it, but Tristan Harris is an engineer who used to work at Google who has since left over some of these concerns that we've been talking about and started a company called the Center for Humane Technology. And if you go to that website, they have a lot of really practical tools of things you can implement to counteract some of these concerns that we've been discussing.

So if people have access to that or access to a film they put out on that topic called The Social Dilemma, that's also another good resource on just kind of opening your eyes on some of what's happening on the other side of your screen that is impacting us in very material ways, even if those ways are subconscious. Yeah. Yeah, wow. I think we've given people some things to think about. I think I've learned a lot. Thank you all for sharing. And thank you all for watching and listening and submitting questions. This episode came as a result of one of our patrons putting a question out there, and this gave us a good opportunity to discuss it.

So anyway, thanks for your time, and we'll catch you in the next episode. Thank you for joining us for this episode. We invite you to join our monthly partner program. Monthly partners are key to the financial sustainability of Anabaptist Perspectives. Partners also gain access to bonus content, including our exclusive podcast where we respond to audience questions and comments. Sign up at anabaptistperspectives.org.