[Slansitartop]

>> Google and Facebook also use your data as input for increasingly sophisticated AI algorithms that put you in a filter bubble

> How is this any different from the pre- or sans-Google and Facebook world?

Easy: the bubbles are tighter and harder to pierce. In the old days, you'd have to get your information from the same news sources as everyone else, only customized at a fairly coarse level (e.g. a city). That regularly pierced your bubble and gave the community a common reference point. Now, many, many more people get all their information from individually-customized feeds that are precisely matched to their biases and their bubble. There's so many fewer common reference points which makes is harder for many people in the same communities to even communicate.

tl;dr: it's an emergent qualitative difference caused by scale.

[0xBABAD00C]

> Easy: the bubbles are tighter and harder to pierce

Says who? It's absolutely the opposite in my experience, having lived in various conservative societies most of my life. Bubbles are much more self-imposed and easily breakable and modifiable now, than even say 30 years ago, let alone 100.