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[Behind the screens:
Who decides what I see online?]

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Hi, my name’s Taylor.

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I study the internet and journalism,

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and how we as citizens receive
information about the world.

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In the olden days 
when people got information,

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it was mostly decided by people.

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There were humans that decided
what we needed to know.

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So when we opened the newspaper
or turned on the evening news,

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it was a person that decided 
what we heard and saw.

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The result of that is
that we all knew similar things.

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Now the internet has changed everything.

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When you go online,
when you open an application,

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what you see is determined not by a person

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but by a machine.

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And this is awesome in a lot of ways.

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It allows you to use Google Maps,

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it allows you to order food online,

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it allows you to connect
with friends around the world

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and share information,

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but there are aspects of this machine that
we need to think really carefully about

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because they determine
the information that we all receive

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as citizens in a society
and in a democracy.

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So when you open up an app

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and you’re shown a picture
in your Snapchat feed,

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all of that information
is determined by this machine,

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and that machine is driven 
by the incentives of the company

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that owns the website
or owns the application.

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And the incentive is for you 
to spend as much time as possible

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inside that application.

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So they do things that make you feel
very good about being there.

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They allow people to like your photos.

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They show you content
that they think you want to see

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that will either make you
really happy or really angry

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that will get an emotional response
from you to keep you there.

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That is because they want to show you
as many ads as possible when you’re there

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because that is their business model.

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They’re also taking that same
opportunity of you being in their app

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to collect data about you.

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And they use these data to create detailed
profiles of your life and your behaviour,

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and these profiles can then be used
to target more ads back to you.

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And that then determines
what you see as well.

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But all of this isn’t just about
the business model of these companies,

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it actually has an impact on our democracy

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because what we each see on the internet
is highly customized to us,

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to what we like,

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to what we believe,

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to what we want to see or want to believe.

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And that means that as a society,

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we no longer all have
a shared set of knowledge

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which is hard for a democracy
that requires us to work together

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and know the same things to make
decisions about our lives together.

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When we all know different things

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and we’re all being siloed into
our own little bubbles of information,

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it’s incredibility difficult for us
to get along with one another.

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We have no shared experience
or shared knowledge.

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I think it’s really important
that we think critically

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about the information we receive online

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and about the companies
and structures that determine

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what we see on the internet.

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[NewsWise is a project of CIVIX&
The Canadian Journalism Foundation]

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Subtitles by Claudia Contreras
Review by Carol Wang