Cass Sunstein Quotes

You can’t blame the message on the medium, not exactly. But maybe, all things considered, arming everyone with pocket supercomputers, and then filtering most of human experience through social-media feedback loops, wasn’t the greatest idea…however glorious modern communications may be, they’ve also empowered a cast of goons, crooks and jihadists to build audiences and influence world-wide.

Britain and America are two examples where social media will only show you what you like.

The Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see.

If I'm going to be held captive by social media, I'm going to use it against itself.

With the social media phenomenon, where people's opinions inform so much of what we do with our lives, where the number of 'likes' decides what we should program, I cringe.

All these social media sites allow us to confuse truth and popularity. That has to be fixed. Because every normal citizen has a right to know what is factual versus what is amplified by good actors or bad actors.

The Facebook algorithm designers chose to let us see what our friends are talking about. They chose to show us, in some sense, more of the same. And that is the design decision that they could have decided differently. They could have said, "We're going to show you stuff that you've probably never seen before." I think they probably optimized their algorithm to make the most amount of money, and that probably meant showing people stuff that they already sort of agreed with, or were more likely to agree with.

Facebook was looking at which links I clicked on, and it was noticing that 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.

Twitter is growing up, expanding into other countries, and recognizing that the Internet is contrary to what people hoped; the government does reach into the Internet.

The rise of a ubiquitous Internet, along with 24-hour news channels has, in some sense, had the opposite effect from what many might have hoped such free and open access to information would have had. It has instead provided free and open access, without the traditional media filters, to a barrage of disinformation.

Calling China's online censorship system a 'Great Firewall' is increasingly trendy, but misleading. All walls, being the creation of engineers, can be breached with the right tools.

I want Facebook to pick the best 20 items to show me every single time I refresh that screen.

Like it or not, Google and the Chinese government are stuck in a tense, long-term relationship, and can look forward to more high-stakes shadow-boxing in the netherworld of the world's most elaborate system of censorship.

Twitter is awesome to share news with fans, but I would never choose to only have social media and put everything in my life on display.

I am a nonparticipant of social media. I'm not much attracted to anything that involves the willing forfeiture of privacy and the foregrounding of insignificance.

We live in an age where people can not only choose their own sources, but they can choose their own facts.

I think that Internet as such, as a phenomenon is worth prohibiting because it gives nobody anything good.

Social media companies are a gold rush today, and time will tell if they survive. I have no use for them and can't see why people waste time on them. I much prefer physical meeting with true friends, so have never used the service.

Facebook is a private company and, therefore, is entitled to whatever political biases it holds.

I think censorship in the name of fighting fake news is a dangerous thing for Pakistan.

There are websites that any government wants to block. The truth about the Internet is that it's extremely hard to block anything - extremely hard. You'll never get perfect blocking.

Research shows that if people are talking and listening to like-minded others, they become more dogmatic, more unified, and more extreme. Personalized Facebook experiences are a breeding ground for misunderstanding and miscommunication across political lines and, ultimately, for extremism.

If you create a visual that actually captures the imagination, that's not real. It will look real, and that will spread at such lightning speed that by the time it's found out, it has already done its damage. It's a very, very scary time that we're living in. I say it's an age of absurdity.

I think I'm slightly older than the generation that was really bred on social media - I had Facebook in high school, but I was growing up in a time where these things were relatively new, and every generation below me is growing up having every single thing they do seen. And that is kind of frightening.

As Twitter allows you to curate who shows up in your stream - you only see the people you follow or seek out, and those they interact with - users can create whatever world of people they want to be a part of.