The idea of a filter bubble is certainly not a foreign one to me, and I am definitely aware of the bubble that I am in although it takes a different form in my case. My primary source of news is reddit. It’s also my general source of entertainment for when I need it and it’s also a place where I argue about politics a lot. My feed is largely filled with left leaning and democratic political subreddits, and that’s by my own design. I’ve chosen to subscribe to those feeds and not other feeds, and as a result I rarely will see something from the other side. Rather than a bubble being formed involuntarily by an algorithm filtering based on my interests, it’s me directly choosing what I want to see and creating this bubble around myself.

This situation is very common on reddit, and it’s not limited to individual users either. Subreddits are controlled by moderators who enforce rules specific to each subreddit, and as a result these subs often become bubbles of their own wherein the idea of the moderators are enforced. 

The key difference between filter bubbles and the bubble which I have chosen to create for myself, the most harmful difference, is that people within filter bubbles are often not aware of it. I am aware that I’ve created this bubble for myself, and as such I can acknowledge that the bubble is harmful and go out of my way to find ideas that clash with my own and understand them. For people within bubbles without their own knowledge, many will not have that insight into the situation. For them, their source of information has simply grown more pertinent to themselves, and they grow more trapped within the bubble with no real reason to leave it because what they find inside the bubble is what they want to see.