[phaedon]

"[Pariser] went out of his way to “friend” people with conservative politics. When he didn’t click on their updates as often as those of his like-minded contacts, he says, the system dropped the outliers from his news feed."

There's the rub. The Internet, among other things, has created a flood of data into people's lives. Filtering is essential. Pariser's built-in mental filter took over. I understand the premise of what's being said here. But it's more complicated than this. If an article/story/data in general is uninteresting or repellent enough to someone that it's ignored, did it really help that it was on the page briefly as it's skimmed past?

I think the problem is that it _automatically_ dropped things from his feed. It might be good to offer a way to turn filtering off entirely and leave it up to the person. I can't imagine anyone would really want this for long, though.