Cathy O'Neil Quotes

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

Facebook seems to think that it would be liberating if everyone's News Feed could be personalized so that people see only and exactly what they want. Don't believe it. That's a prison.

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

We have more information than ever before, and it is harder to avoid actually seeing what the other side is saying. Yes, we in Business insider focus on publications that we feel speak to us, but that is the same way it was 20 or 100 years ago. In the US, two million people have subscribed to the New York Times and many more millions think it is a terrible, liberal paper they would never read. We can choose to put ourselves in a bubble of only people who agree with us, but in the digital world there are many more ways of saying "Hey, here is something you might want to consider".

For too many of us, it's become safer to retreat into our own bubbles, whether in our neighborhoods or on college campuses, or places of worship or especially our social media feeds, surrounded by people who look like us and share the same political outlook and never challenge our assumptions. And increasingly, we become so secure in our bubbles that we start accepting only information, whether it's true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that is out there.

We only now talk to our own, on Facebook and social media we talk to people, we friend and we like and we follow people who agree with us and rather than engaging with people who disagree with us, we unfollow them, we block them, we non-platform them.

That's one of my favorite things about Twitter: You can tweak your feed into a fabulous novelty engine. That's only one thing you can do with it, but it's one of the things I find most entertaining about it.

Facebook is teachable. If you hide items, you'll see fewer of those kinds of items in the future. Like more items, and you'll see more of those in the future.

I think the Internet has made it easier for people to connect with things that they really like, as well as provide a more personal experience, of 'I found this!' and then you can pass it to friends.

My hope for AI and Facebook in the next decade is you can sit down and tell Facebook, 'This is what I want to hear about today.' Like, I'm having a bad day; I want to hear some good news. If we make our products better, more people will use it - people use it more. It's fairly easy to understand.

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.

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.

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.

Social media and personalization are providing both brand advertisers and end-users with hyper-targeted choices and opportunities for double-digit growth.

If you're always in the company of people who agree with you, you're going to think of people who don't agree with you as venal or stupid. I constantly tell my students that if they're in the company of people who always say "amen" to what you say, find other company. And that is the source of illiberalism, when you are unable to listen to someone who thinks differently. That's when democracies are in trouble.

Nothing is more boring than talking to people who share my opinion anyway.

It's fine to talk about politics with people you agree with. But it is rude to argue about politics with people you disagree with. Political discourse becomes isolated, and isolated discourse becomes more extreme.

The most active people in the country know different things, and because each one tends to hear mostly and deal mostly with people with whom they agree, they are reinforced not simply in the conviction that they are right, which is totally appropriate, but that they are the majority. So you have both sides, the Left and the Right, thinking that the majority of the country is really with them.

I'm not on Twitter. In theory, I really like Instagram. I think it's a warmer environment. I think, though conversations can erupt that aren't always friendly, you have an opportunity to jump in and redirect and even caution people against language and behavior that I personally object to.

People have now been absorbing only that they agree with. You know, part of it is if you're liberal, you consume liberal information. If you're a conservative, you consume conservative information. And there's a certain stridency in both that you know everything, and if somebody doesn't agree with you, you think they don't know what they're talking about, and you become intolerant.

Trump has learned how to function in a world in which people now live in very separate realities, where they get their news from Facebook recommendations and believe in a particular set of facts. Others, who live in a different reality, know quite a different set of facts.

I think we have replaced MTV. MySpace is more convenient. You can search for things, while MTV is just delivering things to you. On MySpace you can pick your own channel and go where you want.

Your filter bubble is your own personal, unique universe of information that you live in online. What's in your filter bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do. But you don't decide what gets in - and more importantly, you don't see what gets edited out.

I always think there are people looking not so much for information as for reassurance and reaffirmation of their views.

What Americans seem to prefer — or at least the subset of them who live on social media — is a private square of people who already agree with them. The most successful of these preachers we call “influencers,” which basically means they get paid to manipulate you, and somehow you listen to them anyway.