I used to use Google News as a news aggregator, but much like other social media, it can subtly put you into an echo chamber.
I am mainly familiar with the Youtube echo chamber (which is owned by Google). If you like a video, that is added to your profile (on the list of likes), and Youtube will recommend related videos to you, unless you turn recommendations off. (You’ll still get alerts for channels you follow.) If you follow a channel, that is added to your profile, and now Youtube will want to recommend videos from similar channels. If you watch a video, that is added to your history. Autoplay is on by default, so you’ll keep on watching videos until you proactively stop, and those videos are related to the one you just watched, so now Youtube thinks you really like the topic, and so forth. You can turn off your history if you want to, but that’s on by default.
I wouldn’t call this biased. I could watch a left leaning channel and only get left leaning stuff, or watch a right leaning channel and only get right leaning stuff, but in either case I’m being put into an echo chamber. It’s not for malicious reasons, but just to get me to keep watching Youtube videos (and ads, of course).
Google is pretty similar. Different people will get different results when they search for the same term. Google News has this problem, which is unfortunate because it offers a wide variety of articles from numerous sources. MSN News has this problem. Facebook being used as a news source has this problem. So I wanted to ask the board: do you know of any news aggregators that don’t do this?
At the moment, I’m checking Associated Press and Reuters, as they seem less biased than most news sources and don’t appear to use echo chamber technology. However, I’m looking for a few more.
I quit Google News for the reasons you mention, and have switched to just bookmarking the news sources I perceive to be the least biased: NPR, AP, Reuters, etc., and just going directly there to read news. I never get news or info on FB or YT.
I also bookmark AllSides, which aggregates so-called Left, Right, and Center articles around a specific story. It’s debatable how they categorize Left, Right and Center sources, but I like the way you can get a variety of views for the same story or topic, since I am not totally averse to lefty or righty info (I can sort thru the BS).
Pew research, BBC News, heck, even Washington Post and Daily Kos are pretty honest within their biases. Check foreight sources regularly. They pick up on a
lot that US Sites miss.
Find too many lies, dump the site and read Iceland Review or The Siberian Times.
The smaller sites are often better. Paperboy is essential.
I think when trying to avoid the echo chambers it is important to avoid the ‘bubble’ search engines.
I suggest using Startpage or DuckDuckGo; they attempt to find the information you are looking for rather than trying to find information just like the last thing you looked at.
Personally, I get my news from Reuters and AP, never from any social media.
You can tell Google News not to include particular sources. By blocking strategically, you can achieve a balance more to your liking.
Mouse over the link and click on the three vertical dots. You’ll get options for “Hide all stories from X;” “More stories like this;” and “Fewer stories like this.”
For me, any time I’m going to watch a video that’s not from youtuber I typically watch or it’s something outside of what I normally watch and I don’t want my recommendations flooded with it, I’ll open it up in a private window. The private window won’t be logged into google/youtube (or anything else) and therefore won’t be saved into your history and recommendations won’t be based off of it.
I’ll sometimes do that with news items as well so I can read something and hope the site I’m using doesn’t think that’s all I want to see now. But with news sites I always worry that those super long URLs might contain an identifier so even opening them in a private window, they still know that I was the one that opened it.
I have tried that, but it does not keep, and the next time I log-in, all my selections and de-selections are not present, and I am back to getting what Google thinks I should see. Maybe I am doing it wrong.
Drop American news sources and your entire world view may well shift. I did it and I’m never going back. I mean, it’s right there if I feel the need for more info, but rarely bother. International sources tend to, ‘just the facts’, a little better, I feel.
BBC, CBC, CNA, SCMP
(Bonus you’ll get news from the rest of the world that the US Press flat out ignores!)