It’s Not a Filter Bubble. It’s a Filter Shroud

Joshua Geltzer wrote for Just Security on the difference between--when it comes to online activity--a "filter bubble" and a "filter shroud," and why the latter is more accurate:

Your experience online is dramatically more belief-reinforcing because Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others have curated your experience to give you only what you want: search results similar to the ones you’ve previously clicked on, stories shared by the friends and family whose pages you spend the most time on, and so on. That’s a difference in degree, though a critical one. But what’s different in kind is that the rest of us can’t even peek into what you’re experiencing. Unlike being able to tune into your cable news station of choice, we have no way of knowing precisely what’s being filtered in and out for you in your increasingly individualized experience of the world through the Internet. That’s not a filter bubble at all. It’s a filter shroud, which hides from the rest of us even basic access to the cycle of self-satisfying reinforcement hardening your beliefs.