← Outrage Overload: Rethinking politics, division, and media
Outrage Overload: Rethinking politics, division, and media
85. Escaping the Filter Bubble: How to Find Consensus in a Divided World - Kristin Jackson
00:27:21
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- [00:06]
Kristin Jackson
This podcast is part of the democracy group.
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David Beckmeier
Welcome to Outrage Overload, a science podcast
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Podcast Narrator/Host
about outrage and lowering the temperature. This is episode 85.
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Tristan Harris
I think the deepest existential risk from this is that the thing that's best at capturing a human being's attention is going to be to show them an individual reality that confirms their worldviews. That's going to be so different from the thing that would confirm our shared sense of reality. So you can think of Facebook. They give it this innocuous, naive goal of like, let's engage people the most. And then that thing is taking entire societies and putting them through a paper shredder where out the other end you get basically filter bubbles and echo chambers where people don't have shared facts and agree on the same reality. That's like, I think, the deepest part of this problem.
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Podcast Narrator/Host
That's technology. Design ethicist Tristan Harris putting a fine point on the problem of systems built to keep us engaged and how they are actually dismantling our shared reality. The end result is an information environment so polarized and confusing that as our guest mentions later in the episode, approximately 80% of the population simply gave up on the news because they couldn't figure out what what the truth was. And that's what we're going to talk about on this episode of the Outrage Overload podcast. I'm your host, David Beckmeier and we're speaking with a leader from a company that believes that when you change how people get their information, you can change the world. They set out to build a platform that serves us, the user, rather than making us the product by giving users full perspective, protecting their privacy, and allowing them to think for themselves. Kristin Jackson is the CEO and co founder of Free Spoke, a privacy focused search engine prioritizing transparency and balanced viewpoints. A seasoned tech entrepreneur and Republican policy expert, she previously served as a director for the U.S. house Committee on Foreign affairs and is a domestic policy advisor for Scott Walker's presidential campaign. Freespoke is one of the few platforms with its own unique index of the web, and it is specifically engineered to counteract the bias and volume that pollutes our feeds. Their goal isn't to tell you what to think, it's to make sure you see the full story, left, right and middle, side by side, so you can draw your own informed conclusions. Ultimately, this work is about nothing less than strengthening our civil society. As she puts it. Their mission is to foster a Ginsburg Scalia environment where strong, smart people can hold completely different viewpoints and. But by being forced to grapple with each other's arguments, they make their own arguments stronger, leading to a better outcome for all of society. Stay with us as we discuss how to opt out of the outrage machine and how a different kind of information platform can help you feel informed and not manipulated.
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David Beckmeier
Kristen Jackson, thank you so much for making time for our program.
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Kristin Jackson
It's great to be here. Looking forward to it.
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David Beckmeier
Yeah. So since we are a, you know, we're not a video podcast and we're not slide deck, we're not going to do screenshots, we have to at least explain to people a little bit what the tool is, is. So, so tell us a little bit about what Free Spoke is and, you know, kind of some basics of how it works, at least from a user's interface perspective. And then we, so people get to have some context for what we're talking about here today.
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Kristin Jackson
Yeah, great. I'm going to start with our why in just one sentence and then tell you the details of how it works. So why is we, you, me, your listeners, we're alive in this moment in time to protect humanity's ability to access and think for yourself. This is a unique moment. With Google kind of on the decline or the traditional search and information changing into the AI future, we are here to grab this moment and that's what Free Spoke, this free spoke tool is all about. We are your content assistant that's serving you already feels a little different than your other content assistants because you don't know if they're serving an advertiser or another interest. So this is a content assistant serving you in three distinct ways, always showing you multiple perspectives, fully protecting your privacy. And we are pornography free. So just a little more detail on those three points. The first one, full perspective, you're always going to see left leaning, right leaning and middle perspective side by side. You're gonna get the mainstream and the non mainstream view. So you can see it all right there. You can think for yourself in that full perspective. You all, we're the only platform that allows you to have podcasts tuned to the moment in the podcast where they're discussing what you searched for so that people like that for that independent thinking and that deeper insight like your podcast today, that goes deeper. So that's a full perspective. Privacy is a game changer. When your privacy is protected, you're actually the customer and not the product. So that's a core element for us. And I don't know if we'll get into the pornography situation today. That kind of came later in our mission. We blocked it from day one because my business partner said to, we learned about a lot of the harms going on there and said this doesn't really serve humanity in an information space. We're just not going to include it.
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David Beckmeier
Yeah, and if you want that stuff, they know how to find it.
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Kristin Jackson
It's out there.
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David Beckmeier
They don't need your tool for that.
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Kristin Jackson
Exactly, exactly.
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David Beckmeier
So tell me a little bit about how you actually present, you know, this, you know, how do you visually sort of distinguish the left, middle, right sources and in an attempt perhaps maybe you don't do this, but in an attempt to sort of not trigger people's kind of immediate defense mode.
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Kristin Jackson
Yeah, it's my favorite thing. So on the technology side, what we've seen because we have our own unique index, so we're not using Google's index or Beans index. So we index the web and what we see is in any 30 day period about three times more left leaning content comes into that index than right leaning content. And that's simply because of volume. There's just large publishers that lean left and they produce content constantly. And so through our design we take in all of that content and we ensure when you're scrolling through the newsfeed on any topic, you're seeing the different viewpoints side by side. So it evens it out in your search results. If you search for a topic, same thing, you're going to see the right perspective, the left perspective. If there's other perspectives that don't fit into that box, that's going to show up in your AI overview. And then you can see those articles labeled left or right. Excuse me, so you can explore yourself. How do we label? Is the main question. Let me just speak to that real quick and I'd love your follow up. We don't want to be the purveyors of truth here because nobody trusts anything today. So the first thing we're going to get is, well, why should we trust you? How should we trust your labeling? So what we did is we use these widely established methodologies. Ad Fonts has one media bias, fact check all sides. They've done methodologies to label at the publisher level where these publishers lean so out of the gate. In answer to user insights, we said we can just help you navigate at the publisher level based on these widely established methodologies.
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David Beckmeier
Yeah, I mean I'm sure because we have a pretty kind of tuned in audience that they have like 10,000 questions they want me to ask so hopefully I'll get to at least some of them. And some of them, they'll probably have to explore on their own. But, you know, and so that triggers also a few questions for me as well. I mean, you know, when you say things like ad fontes and media fact based and stuff like that, you know, I also get feedback and I hear from listeners about this that, you know, they consider those sources themselves sort of biased. Right. And there are also some, you know, academic challenges to some of that too, because, and I know we've talked about this a little bit before, that trying to rate a whole publication is kind of hard because their quality and their bias within can even move around a little bit. But anyway, just curious to get some, some of your thoughts on that kind of thing. I mean, you can't necessarily do anything about it, but I'm just curious how it's kind of worked into your thinking.
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Kristin Jackson
They do have. Everybody has a bias. I would argue you have a bias. So by taking the three methodologies and finding the overlap, we feel like. And we get arguments, right? People are like, fox News isn't right anymore. Now it's left. It's like, okay, well, we're going to label Fox News, right? And you can navigate from there. We want you to think for yourself. We're just helping the mom in Michigan who told us, I woke up and the United States had killed Soleimani and I didn't know if we were going into World War iii and I had to rush out of the house to get my kid to school. And I read one article and halfway through it was biased and I, I didn't feel like I had information to keep my family safe. So she's. When the facilitator said, well, when you have found something you trust, what have you done? And she said, well, when I read something from the right and something from the left where there's overlap, I trust it. So we're taking widely established labeling and helping you have that easy access to compare a couple sides and get to the truth. Now, to your other point, people want us to keep labeling. People love the labeling. That's the feedback we get. They come in and they see label content. And then there's some. We haven't labeled podcasts yet. And people say, why aren't the podcasts labeled? I want them labeled. You know, so it's a, it's a positive feedback on the labeling. And people want more. They want it labeled at the author level, not the publisher. All of those are great opportunities ahead of us to go deeper, but there's a lot of value. And I I'd love to give you one more example of where the publisher labeling helped, but I'll let you go if you have any questions.
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David Beckmeier
No, sure, drop that in. And then I do, I do have a bunch of questions, but I'll see how many of I'm able to get to.
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Kristin Jackson
Okay. I have this one example I love. So we were talking to, I'm going to try to protect our identity but established California institution and this top researcher who's really established in researching search interface and you know, she labeled herself as leaning left. And we said I would love, I said I would love for you to rate our interface. Like what do you think about it? And my favorite thing from this individual was she read through it and she said your labeling isn't perfect because I read something from Fox News which was quote, surprisingly neutral and you labeled it to the right. And what is so beautiful about that statement is if somebody on the right had told this individual Fox News writes neutral reporting, there's no way she would have been able to hear it. And I understand that. But because we displayed it and labeled it and it was easy to glance through, she on her own accord was like surprisingly like the New York Times and NPR would never tell me that Fox News ever writes something neutral. But because I could kind of go, go through and see it for myself, I have a perspective.
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David Beckmeier
Yeah, I mean I recently spoke with you know, a researcher on, on a related topic to that where they did a bunch of exercises with, with a bunch of studies with participants where they took the labeling off, you know, and had, and they picked out, you know, the article. They cherry picked the articles a little bit. But then they, but then they took off the labeling and asked is this, you know, who do you think did this? And you know, it would, they would say Fox News. And it was the, you know, it was, it was Washington Post and vice versa and stuff like that. Right. So yeah, as we ment, you know that these publications aren't as black as much as in a box as people often think. And I do want to make one other comment and you can add to it if you want to, but I would just want to make just comment sort of for listeners that, you know, you said that in a month you'll get three times more left leaning sources or information coming in than right leaning. And I'm sure some people will hear that and say, well that's an argument to explain how it's a plot from Hollywood or somewhere to just feed everybody this left leaning information. I just wanted to say, you Know, that doesn't have to be that. Can have that conspiracy theory if you want, but it also doesn't have to be that because if you think about journalism itself, right. And academia as well, it just attracts people that end up sort of being more left leaning. And that's a different problem. And maybe we need to look into that. I think we should probably look into that and try to make those, those fields more open to, to people with broader perspectives. But some of that's just like, that's just a natural consequence that those people kind of. There's more people that lean left in those fields. So I kind of want to say it's probably not a big plot to try to indoctrinate your, your kids or something.
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Kristin Jackson
I just wanted to quickly validate what you're saying. It is not. We're not seeing that there's some major problem there. We're seeing some large organizations are more left leaning and they just have the capability to produce more content. And so we even it out for you.
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David Beckmeier
Yeah, well, and something that I wanted to say there too, I think it was Drew Steigerwald from 1440 who was, was talking about how, you know, you know, this idea, his argument sort of against, or at least that this is not a solution in itself. This idea of, well, I take something from the right and take something from the left and therefore my problems are solved. You know, he was kind of saying, well, if I take something that's not very good quality from the left, I take something that's not very good quality from the right. Am I really any better informed or do I just have more garbage coming in? So I guess I want to let you talk about that a little bit. And when you talk about labeling, is there also some kind of a quality rating as well?
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Kristin Jackson
Right now we aren't going any deeper on labeling because as a user, you want sugar, you want to quickly get to your answer. You want a tweet level of context there generally. And so what we do is we help you easily get there without bogging you down with labels. People are asking for more labels. We'll get there. But why you can navigate through it helps you navigate through that, maybe lower quality faster, is because you're going to ask a question and you're going to get an AI overview. And what we're doing through that overview is we're taking all that content, right, left, middle, mainstream, non mainstream, and content from within podcasts. And we're finding where there's overlap, where multiple perspectives are saying the same thing. We pull that into a consensus section. So it's a. I think that's really the difference is you have the whole web index at your fingertips. Pull it up, find consensus, and then a perspective breakdown. Oftentimes it's just a. It's not even politically motivated perspectives. It's just different perspectives. And so you'll see that broken down and each one is cited. So you can see where is this coming from? What's the context for it? That really helps you navigate information quickly.
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David Beckmeier
Right. Then again, there's so many questions, but before we get too far off the rails on some of those, and I know you've kind of touched on this with your answer so far, but I wanted to just ask more explicitly, you know, sort of, who is this? Is this tool for, like, is Free Spoke more for the person, for the person who kind of wants more news, or maybe for that person who is avoiding news?
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Kristin Jackson
It's really, It's a tool. It's for three different types of audience. So one is just people who want the full story. If you're a person out there and you're like, I want to get information, what's happening? And I want the full story. I don't want to get stuck in the echo chamber as you've talked about with some of your other guests. I don't want to be manipulated, either for my data or to be served ads or if somebody has some political motivation. And I want to think for myself. So that early adopter, we really get people who come in who say, I, I'm actually pretty good at this already, Kristen. I know how to break through an echo chamber. I know which side. And what's so fun for me, I've had two individuals on each side of the political aisle say, I thought I was really good at it. But now that I get my information from Free Spoke, I was still in an echo chamber. I didn't realize. So those people love our platform. There's about what we see. I'm curious if you have a different statistic, but I haven't found a perfect study, but we see about 20% of people have stayed really engaged. They study, they. They get their information, they debate these topics. And then there's about 80% of the population. It's like, I have to be honest, I gave up. I stopped following it because I wasn't getting value and I couldn't figure out what the truth was. And so I actually stopped. So we serve both the 20% because they love having that better disagreement, that better debate, when you can see the full story right there. And the 80% comes back through Free Spoke because they're like, oh, this is so rewarding to be able to get information, see the full perspective and move on and feel informed and not manipulated. So that's. Those are the people we serve. Additionally quickly, we serve businesses. So if you produce content, we provide the search bar in your product, so it consumes all of your written and audio content and synthesizes that into consensus and perspective breakdown for your user base. So we serve businesses and then we serve nonprofits. So serving folks who really are trying to fight through polarization help people see disagreement and disagree smarter.
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David Beckmeier
Interesting. That's awesome. So I think that that leads me to a question that maybe it's too early in the conversation to have, but
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Podcast Narrator/Host
I think it just takes me there.
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David Beckmeier
So I wanted to just talk about, you know, with this, with Free Spoke, what changes do you hope to see in people and maybe even how do you hope Free Spoke. Free Spoke maybe changes our civil society?
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Kristin Jackson
I think how we as a company are building Free Spoke is to change the world. When you change how people get their information, you can change the world. And I can't wait for this world when this brilliant youth. I almost said it, California institution researcher comes around and is working with people who she couldn't see before just because there was just such a divide. The brilliance that comes into environmental policy, the brilliance that comes into immigration policy, because you can see each other. It. It goes into a Ginsburg Scalia environment. Those individuals completely disagree. They were not ever going to propose the same policy. But when Scalia passed away, Ruth Bader Ginsburg said he was my best friend and when I read his briefs before I published mine, I would have to go back and rewrite and make them stronger. So she didn't take Scalia's viewpoint, but her arguments on her side got stronger and better, and the outcome for society was stronger and better. So that's what Free Spoke is allowing society to do again. The opportunity is endless when we can see each other disagree smarter and have better outcomes.
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David Beckmeier
Well, I hope that's true.
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Kristin Jackson
I'm way more optimistic today than I believe my host is.
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David Beckmeier
Yeah, we're. Well, I mean, you know, it doesn't help to be a. Be a person that actually spends a lot of time on social media for sort of research purposes and you get to see those conversations and see what the sort of the world sees.
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Kristin Jackson
The pool.
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David Beckmeier
Yeah. So, you know, on this show, we've talked about some other tools. We've talked about 1440, we've talked about otherweb with, with, with the founders of those products. And people often talk about Ground News. So. So how does Free Spoke kind of fit in this landscape?
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Kristin Jackson
What it's very similar, 1440 and ground news, and that you're going to be fully informed to have the full story. The benefit on great tools at Free Spoke is you can search for anything at any given moment. And particularly if it's hot in the news and you're trying to be like, well, this just happened. What. How do I think about this? You have that full web index at your fingertips, brought into retrieval. Augmented generative AI, technical term, but you have your full AI overview. So we're really serving you real time on any topic you're looking for versus those other tools that have a little bit of lag and need that human to step in and get it set up for you.
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David Beckmeier
Yeah, well, since we brought up breaking
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Podcast Narrator/Host
news,
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David Beckmeier
I mentioned before that this might make this episode a little bit less evergreen. But I think, as we mentioned, these moments will, I think, still be in people's minds. But I can't help but talk a little bit about the shootings by federal agents in Minneapolis. And we've got one of these, some people call this sort of a scissors situation. Right. Where you've got one side. You know, the federal agencies are claiming that the victims were domestic terrorists and that the agents fired in self defense. And then you got people looking at videos, independent experts and state officials that are suggesting something entirely different. I was mentioning before we started recording that, you know, that I'm, I'm in a tough place with this most recent shooting in terms of this work, this kind of work. And I'm literally asking like, is this a way I should be spending my time? Am I getting anywhere? Am I doing any good? And you were much more optimistic about that. So tell us a little bit about that. Give us some of that optimism. Pass that on a little bit.
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Kristin Jackson
Yeah. For better or worse, we are going to have really difficult topics to navigate. I mean, we have in our history had very difficult topics to navigate from, you know, Martin Luther King's assassination to Mark, John F. Kennedy's assassination. Right. Like, we've had huge, monumental challenges as a nation and it's not going to stop. We've had Covid, where people are trying to get information. We have tragedies happening in Minnesota where people are trying to get information. And we can't lose you and your passion for making sure people have access to information that is quality, that shows as a nation there's different viewpoints. And from our very beginning our, our philosophers and our founding fathers had differences of opinion. That's what makes us great. And if you can't access those differences of opinion and debate them intelligently, we can have a free public square. But if you don't have a public library to go have an informed debate, that public square is wasted. So you stepping away to go fight on one side is part of the problem. What you are doing for humanity is saying we need inspired debate. Like our early philosophers, our founding fathers and our Supreme Court justices laid the ground and I am here to make sure you have it. And we debate well for the future of humanity. And it's a great opportunity right now in this moment to deliver that.
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David Beckmeier
That's great. So I want to ask kind of a practical question. You mentioned before that this is that the users of this service are not the product. So you know, you have the Googles of the world who you know are funded by, you know, make massive amounts of money because of the ads they put in those. They still make a lot of money from those click ads, believe it or not. And it's still a big source of their funding and it keeps that service operating. So from a practical perspective, what's going to keep this service operating and how can people help with that or where does that stand?
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Kristin Jackson
Yeah, it's really a belief from day one that we have to serve you as the customer and that's how we're going to shift society. So when you pay for free Spoke premium you will get a completely ad free experience and then you get additional services on top of. But out of the gate you can use free spoke for free freespoke.com you can download the app and look for the fine print so you don't have to pay. And you're going to use, you're going to get the full experience, you're going to see full perspective but you're going to see privacy oriented ads. So DuckDuckGo paved the way there and said you can make some revenue off ads that aren't tracking you around. But you search for lawnmowers and you got a lawnmower ad. And when you pay to be the customer that goes away and you get more personalized experiences because you're actually getting served as a customer. We have the benefit of building on the back of giants. So we had already built our full index. We're really well positioned to take advantage of this moment in time of AI where it is being subsidized by investors to jump ahead and provide the service to where we don't have to generate billions of next year in order to start to break even. So it's a huge opportunity for your, for you, for your listeners to say, I do want to pave this future. I do want an information platform that serves me as a customer and I want to bring to life what Google's founders always wanted. If you read the white paper that Sergey Brin and Larry Page wrote in the year 2000, they said you cannot monetize information platforms through ads. It will be biased towards advertisers and hurt consumers. They put that out there. You can see it today. And they just didn't innovate on the business model and what they said came true. So if you want to be a part of that future, then pay for free Spoke Premium so we can pay for that future.
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Podcast Narrator/Host
Awesome.
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David Beckmeier
So we can find it@freespoke.com and it's available to anybody.
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Kristin Jackson
It is. Yep. Check it out today or in your app store.
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David Beckmeier
Awesome. Oh, and there's also apps. Okay. Awesome. Great. Well, again, Kristen Jackson, thanks so much for making time for us. And I'm sure I didn't get to all the questions my listeners want to ask, but hopefully they'll be able to figure it out by using the tool.
- [26:08]
Kristin Jackson
Yeah, you can send me happy email or hey, email. I'll take either1@Kristenreespec.com, i'd love to hear.
- [26:17]
David Beckmeier
Awesome. Well, again, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
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Podcast Narrator/Host
That is it for this episode of the Outrage Overload podcast. For links to everything we talked about on this episode, go to outrageoverload.net Outrage Overload is a Connors Institute podcast. The Connors Institute for Nonpartisan Research and Civic Engagement at Shippensburg University University works to disseminate high quality nonpartisan information to the American public around issues of societal well being, democracy promotion and news literacy. If you found this episode valuable, please share it or leave a review.
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David Beckmeier
It really helps.
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Podcast Narrator/Host
Thanks for listening and I'll catch you next time.