These days, it seems harder and harder to be civil and open minded on nearly any topic. Despite being more digitally connected than ever before, we as a society appear to have groups of people who are more apart on ideology than ever before.
I am sure you've heard of confirmation bias--our inate need to find proof of our own beliefs. While this cognitive bias has been known for quite some time, I don't think we've fully grasped its potentially disasterous impact when modern machine learning techniques are applied to virtually all online experiences.
Recommendation engines used by Amazon, Netflix, YouTube, etc. all feed off your activity. When you see a link that seems interesting to you and click on it, that event is recorded. The information about what you just read/watched/bought is now used by that company's recommendation engine to populate their "Up next" or "Others also bought" or "You may also be interested in" feeds. Now you may think, "oh this is great, this service knows what I like", and click on another link in that recommended feed. This generates another data point for the recommendation engine. When you do this over and over, over the course of days and months, various backend services build up a very comprehensive profile of who you are and what you like. Since each one of these companies' main goals is to get you to either consume more of their content or buy more things, its recommendation engine is quite happy to continue to pump more and more things you will like into your feed. Afterall, optimizing profits is the name of the game.
This is not so bad when it comes to online shopping, because if I buy diapers and baby food, you are probably right to guess that I may also want baby clothes and baby bath toys. The trouble comes when this same system is applied to news and other media that is suppose to be fact reporting. Suddenly that one article you clicked on that seemed interesting has resulted in your feed overflowing with stories about alien abductions and what not. Since you don't want that, you end up clicking on articles or videos that confirm what you already think. And because of that, more and more, all you see day in and day out are such articles and videos. Now add a global pandemic to this already poor diet of information where everyone is locked indoors with nothing but a continuous feed of recommended and urgent breaking stories to consume, and you end up with a very unhealthy situation.
As if this isn't already a big enough dumpster fire, you also need to add all the tricky marketing tactics that is on every website these days. Every click and even non-click is tracked and sold to the highest bidder, cross companies, cross geographic boundaries. All that information is fed into more and more optimization algorithms designed to sell you ideas or products, pushing you further and faster down a path you are already on.
So, what can you do to break this cycle? I definitely don't have all the answers, but maybe when you are looking for news, do so in your browser's incognito mode. You should definitely be running an ad block plugin in your browser. And if you are more technical, run Pi-Hole to black hole all ad servers. Also, maybe try visiting different news sites, not only ones you always read stories from. Maybe best of all, have a good old fashioned (virtual) discussion with some of your friends who are a little different than you, especially those who don't agree with everything you say.
It is easy to fall into the trap of confirmation bias, it is a lot harder to challenge your own preconceptions and see the world from someone else's perspective. If we don't start doing this, there is a real chance we end up recommending ourselves into clusters of extremism.
