There is politics as in FSF / GNU and there is politics as in Mozilla. Lot of mozilla activism is not relevant to privacy / open web. Not to mention it also limits many people from donating to them.
Why does privacy have anything to do with conspiracy theories and “disinformation”. Privacy should in fact be about respecting the individual and choices, and believing in people being intelligent enough (as groups) to make good choices.
Basically the opposite of this pro censorship Mozilla stance.
Maybe because rationality could be exercised only if a person is given diverse high-quality information. Being tracked means being figured out, put in a Turing box, and utilized in accordance with someone else's agenda. This research seems to attempt observing how digital bubbles form and how they could be circumvented.
Recommendation bubbles are partly privacy matter -- without the ability to track users, there would be no recommendation bubbles. It may sound like a far-fetched possibility -- how to maintain privacy of logged in users? But I figure it is doable from technical standpoint; the key question would be how to transform the financial part of the operation to keep Youtube afloat.
At this point, even the awareness of recommendation bubbles and their shape & size can help quite a bit. It's a valid research.
It grates me that Mozilla seems to take very one-sided view on the politics of it, but hey, it's a start. Hopefully others will follow to counter-balance the Mozilla's slant.
You can recommend just based on content. I hardly ever open the youtube homepage. And often open links in incognito mode. Still get to see all these recommendations next to a video.
I don't see how you could not have a "recommendation bubble" as long as you have recommendations. Even if they were to be 100% manual it's still a bubble of some kind.
Not only that, you effectively have these bubbles outside the internet too. A book will recommend further reading, friends will recommend certain things and so forth. There's no escaping it.
When I go to the YouTube homepage these recommendations are absolute junk. Links friends send me are much more relevant and influential.
IMO the most charitable reading of this initiative is that they believe the algorithm is somehow biased towards exposing and warming people to harmful content in an unobvious way.
Another name for recommendation bubble is sub-culture. Google has decided that there should be only one and the results are just as inane as a high school clique taking over the school newspaper.
