How to Fix the Internet With a Single Regulation
Algorithms have led to filter bubbles and fueled polarization. It’s time to bring back the tech for a shared reality.
In 2016, the United Nations declared access to the internet to be a basic human right, right up there with shelter, food, and water. And while many of us may have access to an internet, none of us has access to the internet. That’s because it isn’t one uniform entity.
Thanks to surveillance and customizations technologies, each of us gets our own internet. Your Google search results are different than mine. Your feeds show different posts and ads than mine — even if we subscribe to the same sources. Your news apps deliver different news to you than mine, prioritized differently, and from a different political perspective.
This, more than anything else, presents our country’s greatest barrier to engaging in anything resembling civic discourse. The issue isn’t the content (though it can certainly be problematic). It’s the platforms. How can we forge any semblance of consensus with people who are not even looking at the same realities? To fix the net’s influence on political discourse, we need to end the automated customization of what we see.
