Our society has shifted a large part of everyday life to the internet. For many people, communication and acquiring information happens exclusively online. Facebook’s newsfeed acts like a news magazine, Google as a lexicon, and messengers like WhatsApp or Skype serve as forums for sharing information with friends, colleagues, and family. We now find almost everything we want to know online. Internet providers know that too: Google, Facebook, Netflix, and Instagram know how important their part is in society. They are therefore constantly refining their algorithms when it comes to user-friendliness: they only show us the information that is supposedly relevant to us.
This is nothing new: the popular service providers on the internet collect data about user behavior on their platforms and promise to adapt the user experience even better to the needs of users – often without them having to do anything. In the past, data collection has been criticized by many experts, but primarily under the (very important) aspect of data protection. The term 'data leech' describes how comprehensive Google, Facebook, etc. collect and analyze users’ personal data: how much time does someone spend online? Where do they live? What are their hobbies?
Of course, all this information is also used by these companies for their own purposes: Google and Facebook earn a large part of their revenue from personalized advertising, for example. But the information should also help to better tailor offers to the respective user. This means not only is the advertising personalized, but also the offers.
As a result, these services only show us the news, information, and opinions that match our user profile. This may seem a positive thing at first: feeds are no longer stuffed with articles that don’t interest you in any way, popular posts are no longer cluttered with comments that you don’t want to read, you don’t have to wade through arguments that don’t lead anywhere, etc. But in the long term, this creates problems that only come to light when you question the filtering mechanisms of social media.