Echo Chambers Quotes

Nutty ideas persist longer than they used to because ideas can dwell in the safe space of like-minded groups on the internet.

The politicians are not the only people who are in their own silos. Many of our citizens only watch or listen to the news that they want to hear, and if there is anything else, they turn it off. We all need to listen to the people who are on the other side.

A democracy becomes ungovernable if a substantial portion of the population lives in an alternative reality…. How do you have a rational conversation about President Obama’s policies of he believes that Obama is a spy for Iran.

There's an apparent freedom, an apparent liberty of access to everything, but you can't use it because it's too much. Everything is at the same level. You even have fake news. You have to go through fake news to make up your mind. Facts and lies are treated as equal. There are even people who are against the idea of climate change.

The most active people in the country know different things, and because each one tends to hear mostly and deal mostly with people with whom they agree, they are reinforced not simply in the conviction that they are right, which is totally appropriate, but that they are the majority. So you have both sides, the Left and the Right, thinking that the majority of the country is really with them.

Politics is always antagonistic and tribalistic. But social media puts us in isolated information bubbles. We're not just disagreeing on politics. We're disagreeing on reality in very fundamental ways.

Today we live in a world now where it is easy to confuse truth and popularity. And you can use money to amplify whatever you believe and get people to believe what is popular is now truthful. And what is not popular may not be truthful.

Facts just don’t mean anything anymore. It’s who shouts the loudest and repeats it the most.

I would say emotionally we've all turned into these sort of toxic, shallow, angry, polarized demons screaming at each other from across echo chambers. My whole thing is that I'm trying to get underneath the anger into the truth that's underneath it.

We live in a world where we don't really hear ideas. We just hear propaganda. That's not just boring. It's also very dangerous.

Stupid people surround themselves with smart people. Smart people surround themselves with smart people who disagree with them.

Even as the world becomes saturated with seemingly unlimited information, “the benefit that ought to come with having a variety of opinions” writes author Bill Bishop, “is lost to the righteousness that is the special entitlement of homogeneous groups.” The result is divisiveness, polarization, and rancor in our national discourse – First World tribalism – with crowds gathering at the poles of every issue.

We get caught in our little silos and end up working against ourselves. And I think social media culture really encourages that, because you're really just shouting into a void hoping someone picks up on what you're saying.

Where older generations are out there struggling to fact-check information and cite sources, Gen Zers don't even bother. They just read the headlines and then speed-scroll to the comments, to see what everyone else says. They're outsourcing the determination of truth and importance to like-minded, trusted influencers.

I think most people are more susceptible to prejudice than to reason. And the parrots of talk radio are just sending out the same stuff. When I look at my e-mails, I see the same Limbaugh rhetoric; apparently, people don't have any ideas of their own. And there's just this drumroll of anti-progressive thought.

Trump's rise was contingent on wide swaths of the country completely tuning out so-called mainstream media sources, while all too many outlets did a poor job covering 2016.

Groups become more extreme and entrenched in their beliefs and polarized from others when members only exchange information that reinforces their views and filter out all else or never learn of alternatives. Thus they narrow their options, and magnify each other's prejudices and misconceptions. This trend leads to blind spots in decision making and to extreme behavior, even terrorism.

The social-media discourse is very different from what it might be on the ground. It's easy to bloviate without having to look anyone in the eye and then having those sentiments swell and amplify and go viral.

The second the news comes on TV, people turn it off or tune it out. People don't want to hear the other side.

People of a certain political view tend to read material of only that point of view … except to cast contempt on the other points of view.

The left and the right live in parallel universes. The right listens to talk radio, the left's on the Internet and they just reinforce one another. They have no sense of reality. I have now one ambition: to retire before it becomes essential to tweet.

You can always spot a well informed man - his views are the same as yours.

People nowadays talk about issues as if they're reading lines off a teleprompter. They recite what they read and echo it without thinking. It has become easier to divide people than to unify them, and to blind them than to give them vision. We are no longer unified like a bowl of Cheerios. Instead, we have become as segregated as a box of Lucky Charms. Every day we see the same leprechauns on TV acting like they're the experts of everything.

Social media has created a digital latticework, but it has also, for some, created abusive commenters, silos, and validation rather than curiosity.

We do our worst when we're surrounded by a lot of people who agree with us.