Stephanie Ruhle Quotes

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.

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.

Anybody who tunes into Rush Limabaugh already knows what he's going to say and is already inclined to agree. So it winds up creating tribes.

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

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.

When people silo themselves by belief, only affiliating with like-minded media organizations and people, we lose the opportunity for genuine conversation, much less persuasion.

The separation of audience into tribes preferring to reinforce their own views with media of similar ideological stripe makes true debate impossible.

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.

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.

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.

People of a certain political view tend to read material of only that point of view … except to cast contempt on the other points of view.

Ideological amplification happens when like minded people deliberate…they push each other to extreme points of views….The argument pool in a group of liberals will be only liberal. Likewise with conservatives, the other way…. Most of us on most issues do not have a ton of information…we might be steered away from moderation…. Political correctness is a good example of ideological amplification.

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

Even as the world becomes saturated with seemingly unlimited information, “the benefit that ought to come with having a variety of opinions” writes author Bill Bishop, “is lost to the righteousness that is the special entitlement of homogeneous groups.” The result is divisiveness, polarization, and rancor in our national discourse – First World tribalism – with crowds gathering at the poles of every issue.

Politics is always antagonistic and tribalistic. But social media puts us in isolated information bubbles. We're not just disagreeing on politics. We're disagreeing on reality in very fundamental ways.

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.

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.

Technology has allowed the creation of media echo chambers, so that a person can reinforce, rather than debate, viewpoints.

Groups become more extreme and entrenched in their beliefs and polarized from others when members only exchange information that reinforces their views and filter out all else or never learn of alternatives. Thus they narrow their options, and magnify each other's prejudices and misconceptions. This trend leads to blind spots in decision making and to extreme behavior, even terrorism.

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.

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.

If I'm a conservative, I'll generally watch Fox. If someone's liberal, they'll generally watch MSNBC. They'll basically learn a set of facts that are completely distinct from one another. They'll get their views validated.

I think it's a very firm part of human nature that if you surround yourself with like-minded people, you'll end up thinking more extreme versions of what you thought before.

Politicians are trapped in their own views.

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