<story><title>What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right</title><url>https://www.washingtonian.com/2019/05/05/what-happened-after-my-13-year-old-son-joined-the-alt-right/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hinkley</author><text>&amp;gt; Sam prides himself on questioning conventional wisdom and subjecting claims to intellectual scrutiny. For kids today, that means Googling stuff. One might think these searches would turn up a variety of perspectives, including at least a few compelling counterarguments. One would be wrong. The Google searches flooded his developing brain with endless bias-confirming “proof” to back up whichever specious alt-right standard was being hoisted that week. Each set of results acted like fertilizer sprinkled on weeds: A forest of distortion flourished.&lt;p&gt;I would like to nominate “Sam” as poster child for why the feedback systems in Google Search and Facebook are so damaging.  It’s one thing to continuously confirm the beliefs of old people, it’s quite another to funnel impressionable children into one extreme or another based on a few semi-random data points.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>michaelbuckbee</author><text>The article doesn&amp;#x27;t use the term I&amp;#x27;ve heard of to describe this, which is &amp;quot;data gap&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Take something like a query for &amp;quot;Is the Earth Flat?&amp;quot;. There&amp;#x27;s not a continual stream of videos, posts, and comments about how round the earth is (it&amp;#x27;s just taken as a given). So Google naturally floats content that says &amp;quot;The Earth is Flat&amp;quot; to the top.&lt;p&gt;This plays out in all sorts of odd and horrific ways. There was a local political contest where one candidate accused the other of some literal nonsense (it was something like they were a demon or smelled like sulfur). This rumor was making the rounds on Facebook, etc and if you Google&amp;#x27;d their name and &amp;quot;sulfer&amp;quot; you&amp;#x27;d find some whacked out post about how some lady stood behind them at a coffee shop and thought they smelled and that they were satan&amp;#x27;s lovechild.&lt;p&gt;What is that candidate to do? Put up their own competing post saying &amp;quot;I don&amp;#x27;t smell like sulfur?&amp;quot;</text></comment>
<story><title>What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right</title><url>https://www.washingtonian.com/2019/05/05/what-happened-after-my-13-year-old-son-joined-the-alt-right/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hinkley</author><text>&amp;gt; Sam prides himself on questioning conventional wisdom and subjecting claims to intellectual scrutiny. For kids today, that means Googling stuff. One might think these searches would turn up a variety of perspectives, including at least a few compelling counterarguments. One would be wrong. The Google searches flooded his developing brain with endless bias-confirming “proof” to back up whichever specious alt-right standard was being hoisted that week. Each set of results acted like fertilizer sprinkled on weeds: A forest of distortion flourished.&lt;p&gt;I would like to nominate “Sam” as poster child for why the feedback systems in Google Search and Facebook are so damaging.  It’s one thing to continuously confirm the beliefs of old people, it’s quite another to funnel impressionable children into one extreme or another based on a few semi-random data points.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mejari</author><text>I saw a similar thing with a religious apologist, they had a very specific claim ready to throw out out to me on a specific supposed &amp;quot;prophecy&amp;quot;, and later googling that I got page after page of religious propaganda. They&amp;#x27;d targeted that particular thing, rather than trying to take over more general listings for &amp;quot;prophecy in the bible&amp;quot;, so that only articles that agreed with them showed up.&lt;p&gt;It took some creative googling to eventually get to an actual academic historical paper on the subject, which then of course immediately blew what they claimed out of the water.</text></comment>