Eli Pariser Quotes

Information's right at our fingertips, but so is what you want to believe. It's the classic thing of someone Googling 'autism vaccines' - they'll find what they're looking for, depending on what they think. You'll find lots of people who are just bolstering what they already think, bolstering their cultural attitude.

As people's opportunities to succumb to confirmation bias increases online - only seeking out information that confirms their prejudices - ignorance, extremism and close-mindedness have continued to rise unabated.

When I first went public with my son Evan's story, I just planned to talk about the 'R' word - Recovery. But soon I was spending most my time talking about the 'V' word - vaccines.

If you give us a safe vaccine, we'll use it. It shouldn't be polio versus autism.

In the case of Pakistan, the CIA actually used a fake vaccination campaign to try to locate Osama bin Laden, so now vaccination is associated with espionage.

A child gets vaccinated and soon after, autism symptoms emerge. The apparent cause-and-effect is understandable but erroneous - more a coincidence of the calendar and childhood developmental stages than anything else, as repeated and exhaustive studies have shown.

What I saw when I was doing research is that in pursuit of a middle ground, people will kind of split the difference between the two extremes that they're hearing. And I think what's problematic is that people are seeing vaccinating on schedule, on time, as an extreme position.

The idea that vaccines are a primary cause of autism is not as crackpot as some might wish. Autism's 60-fold rise in 30 years matches a tripling of the U.S. vaccine schedule.

Vaccine conspiracies, like so much modern cult conspiracy culture, perpetuates itself and lives on indefinitely thanks to the community-building and archiving of the Internet.

Most of us employ the Internet not to seek the best information, but rather to select information that confirms our prejudices.

In an ideological, polarized political environment, people see the reality that they want to see.

We now have access to so much information that we can find support for any prejudice or opinion.

The recent medical controversy over whether vaccinations cause autism reveals a habit of human cognition—thinking anecdotally comes naturally, whereas thinking scientifically does not.

Not only is our electorate polarized, but their sources of information are polarized. Voters choose the sources of information that tells them what they want to hear.

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

The sheer amount of information available weirdly encourages informational overconfidence … ‘evidence’ for any belief you have — I mean any belief — can be found on the internet.

I think a lot of parents who are smart, well-read - they're the ones who are choosing not to vaccinate. And oftentimes, those who may not be as well-read - they are vaccinating. So to say you just have a bunch of crackpots who are choosing not to do this to their children, I just don't think that's actually true.

Alongside the flat-earthers, 9/11 truthers and Obama birthers, the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists have always had a special distinction: They can do immediate and specific damage in a way that the others can't.

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.

The danger of the blogosphere is reading only those you agree with. While there are right-wing blogs that are entertaining freak shows, it's hard to find substantial journalism there.

Facebook Algorithms have got us all screwed up, where we only listen and talk to people with the same views as us, and I think it's not helping us as a culture to grow.

I'm a simple country neuroscientist, not an expert on democracy, but I do know something about how the brain works and how opinion-reinforcing bubbles can distort the picture of reality we build from the information we encounter on a daily basis.

It is true that there are some parents who have concerns about vaccines, but while we hear about these concerns a lot in the media, I don't want people to think that the majority of parents out there do not believe in vaccines and then most kids aren't getting vaccinated. In fact, it's exactly the opposite.

The biggest problem is that Facebook and Google are these giant feedback loops that give people what they want to hear. And when you use them in a world where your biases are being constantly confirmed, you become susceptible to fake news, propaganda, demagoguery.

We live surrounded by people who sound like us, vote like us, spend like us. We get only the news we want to. And then scream into the social media echo chamber that is designed to serve us up information we already like.