Eli Pariser Quotations

I think it's easier than ever to hear only what you want to hear. That doesn't make a good citizen.

To be a good citizen, it's important to be able to put yourself in other people's shoes and see the big picture. If everything you see is rooted in your own identity, that becomes difficult or impossible.

There's the part that I just want what I want, and I don't want to be bothered by anything else, and sort of the short-term more compulsive self. And then that's the longer-term, aspirational self that wants to be informed about the world and wants to be a good citizen. The best media basically helps us strike a balance between those two things.

If you Google some sites about the link between vaccines and autism, you can very quickly find that Google is repeating back to you your view about whether that link exists and not what scientists know, which is that there isn't a link between vaccines and autism. It's a feedback loop that's invisible.

Democracy actually requires that the whole public be able to see common problems and address them and step outside of their own sort of narrow self-interest to do so.

We thought that the Internet was going to connect us all together. As a young geek in rural Maine, I got excited about the Internet because it seemed that I could be connected to the world. What it's looking like increasingly is that the Web is connecting us back to ourselves.

There's the idea that people should be able to control how the information that they're giving to websites is used and monetized in a more clear and powerful way. That's something that probably will need government action.

If you only have one shot at writing a headline, there's a lot of pressure.

I think that people post to social media to help shape their public identity.

If you look at the history of how information flows, there was a time that newspapers were kind of in the place that Google and Facebook are now - how do we get more people to buy a copy? Then there was a shift in the early 20th century. They needed to do better, and readers and consumers demanded that of them.

It feels great to have your own views reflected back to you, and you feel so right, but actually it's very dangerous. Because to make good decisions, you need to have a clear view of what all the options are.

The important thing to remember with the Internet is that there are large companies that have an interest in controlling how information flows in it. They're very effective at lobbying Congress, and that pattern has locked down other communication media in the past. And it will happen again unless we do something about it.

Whether it's Facebook or Google or the other companies, that basic principle that users should be able to see and control information about them that they themselves have revealed to the companies is not baked into how the companies work. But it's bigger than privacy. Privacy is about what you're willing to reveal about yourself.

Rather than saying people aren't interested when things don't take off, you should take it on yourself to say, 'I'm not doing a great job of telling the story in a way that makes it interesting.

Your computer monitor is a kind a one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click.

It's a civic virtue to be exposed to things that appear to be outside your interest. In a complex world, almost everything affects you – that closes the loop on pecuniary self-interest. Customers are always right, but people aren't.

The algorithms that orchestrate our ads are starting to orchestrate our lives.

Personalization is based on a bargain. In exchange for the service of filtering, you hand large companies an enormous amount of data about your daily life--much of whic you might not trust your friends with.

In the last year, grassroots contributors like us gave more than $300 million to the Kerry campaign and the DNC, and proved that the Party doesn't need corporate cash to be competitive. Now it's our Party: we bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back.

We bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back.

In a broadcast society, there were these gatekeepers, the editors, and they controlled the flows of information. Along came the Internet and it swept them out of the way, and it allowed all of us to connect together, and it was awesome. But that's not actually what's happening right now.

The Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see.

Your filter bubble is your own personal, unique universe of information that you live in online. What's in your filter bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do. But you don't decide what gets in - and more importantly, you don't see what gets edited out.

We've always believed that popular culture and populist politics go hand in hand. It's an honor to be working with so many respected and influential artists, and we're indebted to them for having the courage to speak out at a time when our country so desperately needs change. For our 2.5 million members and far beyond, the Vote for Change tour will have a seismic cultural impact.

Eric Schmidt likes to point out that if you recorded all human communication from the dawn of time to 2003, it takes up about five billion gigabytes of storage space. Now were creating that much data every two days

More voices means less trust in any given voice.

In a personalized world, important but complex or unpleasant issues are less likely to come to our attention at all.

A world constructed from the familiar is the world in which there's nothing to learn.

By constantly moving the flashlight of your attention to the perimeter of your understanding, you enlarge your sense of the world.

Facebook was looking at which links I clicked on, and it was noticing that I was clicking more on my liberal friends' links than on my conservative friends' links. And without consulting me about it, it had edited them out. They disappeared.

We really need the Internet to be that thing that we all dreamed of it being. We need it to connect us all together. We need it to introduce us to new ideas and new people and different perspectives. And it's not going to do that if it leaves us all isolated in a Web of one.

Most of them are still hanging on to the money.

Michael Brown taught us that vital national positions must be filled with qualified candidates, not political friends with little experience.

We believe this is a diversion that Tom DeLay and his lawyer have cooked up to distract from his serious legal problems and presumably that is what Mr. Earle is interested in showing.

We're working hard to broaden the 2006 battlefield. As more and more people realize that the House is up for grabs, that'll open the floodgates in terms of energy and support from our members.

We need to fix the Bush prescription drug plan that subsidizes big pharmaceutical companies at the expense of senior citizens. We need to stop the oil companies from obscene profiteering, which reduces the standard of living for so many Americans. As usual, this Administration prescribes the same quack medicine for all our ailments: tax breaks for the richest Americans and the largest, most profitable corporations.

We are always on the lookout for interesting initiatives that leverage technology to get people involved. Maybe we're not looking in the right places . . . but I haven't seen another approach exactly like it. If this works, obviously, we would be interested in helping expand it beyond Colorado.

The creativity and ingenuity that have driven the Internet have always relied on an open platform where the haves and have-nots get treated equally. This e-mail tax system is a big step toward dismantling that system.

There is no information to indicate she meets the high bar necessary for the next justice on the Supreme Court.

Together, we can answer this question. If you've been holding off on contributing to a presidential campaign, now's the time to jump in. We have a Democratic nominee, and he needs our support today.

This is a big moment. We're coming together from across the spectrum to protect the principles that are core to our identity as Americans.

America can't afford a Supreme Court justice -- let alone a chief justice -- with Roberts' record of eroding the rights of workers and turning back the clock on civil rights. There's no mistaking that he's a stealth right-wing candidate.