Popping the Filter Bubble

Joan Blades was an entrepreneur co-founder of MoveOn.org.

John Gable (also a tech entrepreneur) was a Republican operative — helping elect politicians like Trent Lott and Mitch McConnell.

Joan and John are the unlikely duo behind a viral TED talk on the problem of political polarization, and the founders of a technology-based solution.

AllSides.com is your one-stop shop for headlines from across the political spectrum. Like a bulldozer for bias, All Sides conveniently aggregates stories from around the web along with a rating — left, right, center, or left- or right-leaning.

Screenshot of AllSides.com. Try switching your morning news source from Drudge Report or Huffington Post to AllSides.com and see what it does to your blood pressure.

I’ll admit — it’s fun to get mad at the idiocy of the “other side” and the internet offers an endless supply of confirmation bias for whatever opinions you hold.

But the danger of such extreme political polarization is that our government may not function the way it’s supposed to.

In my book Power to the States: How Federalism 2.0 Can Make America Governable Again, I theorized that anger in politics is a result of too much power being given to Federal government.

John and Joan, however, see something else — namely, that the advent of digital communities allows us to select our news sources to fit our narrow beliefs (rather than forming our beliefs from the same set of facts).

John and Joan joined me to discuss the nature of these “filter bubbles” — our self-made echo chambers — and how their platform works to “pop” these bubbles of bias.

Be sure to catch the full conversation.