You must have thought that the world has gone mad. That people used to reason and now they don't. That positions have all turned nasty together, suddenly, in recent years.
It's a widespread perception, and it's almost entirely a technical artifact. Not of the world, but of what is shown to you of the world.
You don't see what you don't see
The feed does not show you what has been published. It shows you a selection, sorted based on what, according to your past reactions, will keep you engaged longer.
Everyone knows this so far. What escapes is something else, and that's what makes the phenomenon hard to fix.
The selection is invisible. You receive no signal of what has been discarded. There's no counter telling you how many different positions from yours were excluded this morning. You simply see a flowing stream, coherent, credible, and it seems like the world.
It's exactly this absence of signal that makes you conclude that the world thinks like you. You don't deduce it arrogantly. You deduce it from the data you have, and the data you have has been filtered before reaching you.
Hence the phrase heard everywhere after every election, every referendum, every poll: 'But how, I didn't know anyone who thought that way.' It's true. You didn't know anyone, because no one was shown to you.
The piece almost nobody tells
Now the most important part, and the least intuitive.
Your feed doesn't just show people who agree with you. It also shows people who disagree, but not by chance. It shows you the worst version of the opposing side.
The reason is purely mechanical. A reasonable person who disagrees with reasoned arguments doesn't provoke a reaction. You read it, maybe half-nod, and scroll. It generates nothing measurable.
A person who says the same thing in the most aggressive and stupid way possible makes you stop, get indignant, comment, share to show others.
Which of the two is more likely to appear before you? Always the second. Not because it represents that group, but because it works better as content.
The result is devastating and goes unnoticed. You form an idea of the other side based on a sample selected to be the worst available. And the other side, at the same time, is forming an idea of you exactly the same way.
Two groups of largely reasonable people end up convinced that they face fanatics, because each has only seen the fanatics of the other. No conspiracy needed. Just a system that sorts content by the reaction it provokes.
Why knowing it is not enough
Here's where those who read these articles and think they are above it fall.
The bubble is not perceived from within, by definition. If you perceived it, it wouldn't be a bubble; it would be a list of things you know you don't know. The feeling inside a bubble is not the feeling of being isolated. It's the feeling of simply being right, and it's indistinguishable from actually being right.
This is why the most dangerous phrase of all is the one that would come naturally now, namely that others are in the bubble. Whoever says it is describing their own.
What can be done, concretely
There are no elegant solutions. There is an uncomfortable one and a practical one.
The uncomfortable one. Seek the best version of the position you reject, not the one that appeared before you. If you can't formulate the opponent's argument in a way that an opponent would recognize as correct, you are not rejecting it. You are rejecting the caricature that was served to you.
The practical one, and it's worth more than the first. When you are outraged by a screenshot of someone who said something crazy, stop for a second and ask yourself why that one. It didn't come to you because it's representative. It came to you because it's the most outrageous the system could find for you today.
The world has not gone mad. They are showing you, every day, its worst three percent, and you are mistaking them for the average.
Segnale & Rumore is a column about how digital communication really works, among algorithms, platforms, and online reputation. It is written by Calogero Bono, who works with these machines every day.
