Project Coulter

One day, while aimlessly travelling through the reaches of the internet I stumbled across a news article on wired.com. The article is written by Kim Zetter and covers Eli Pariser's TED presentation.  His presentation detailed the role facebook,google, and our own predisposition to reading news we already agree with,  play in limiting our access to a variety of information. The whole article can be found here. These are some important excerpts:

The internet was supposed to rid us of traditional media gatekeepers who controlled the flow of information. “But what we’re seeing is a passing of the torch from human gatekeepers to algorithmic ones,” he said.

 

Take his Facebook page, for example. Pariser used to receive comments and links from readers on both sides of the political spectrum. Then one day he noticed his conservative friends had disappeared; only links from his liberal friends remained. Facebook, without asking him, had seen that he clicked more often on links from left-leaning friends and simply edited out the rest. The site used an algorithm that hides from view the kinds of content it has determined, from your past activity, that you are less likely to interact with.

Facebook isn’t alone in doing this kind of personalization, of course. Two people in different regions with different interests will receive different Google results when typing in the same search terms. To test it, Pariser asked friends in different locations to search on the protests in Egypt and send him screenshots of their results. While his friend Scott’s results were full of links about the protests, Daniel’s results were not.

 

After reading this article I decided that it was only right to purposefully and independently seek out news sources that I do not agree with.  Not only would this expand the viewpoints I came in contact with, but gives me the opportunity to hone my skills in actively questioning the information I am presented.

What Better Candidate Then Ann Coulter?

Ann Coulter is a famous right wing mouthpiece.  She repeatedly appears on America's most popular news station, FOX news, has written multiple books, and has a blog she updates regularly.  She has been described as a biased ideologue and often takes criticism for her remarks; at times for the actual message of her writing, and others times out of context attacks on her dry, brash, humour. The accuracies of her writings and representation of her source material has also been challenged:

Similar to as Franken has done, I plan to read Coulter's most recent blog posts and search for the sources of her information, which she does not readily supply.  By doing this, I am hoping to find not only flaws in Ann Coulter's writing, but more importantly, I hope to find truth which will challenge my own thinking.