On choosing what I see before the feed chooses for me.
I Break My Algorithm on Purpose
I deliberately break my own algorithm. Whenever I look up one opinion about an event, an issue, or an argument, I make myself search for the opposite one too. If I read opinion A, I go looking for opinion B. It does not matter whether I agree with it. In fact, sometimes I look for it precisely because I know I will not. I do this because I want to be the one choosing what I consume. I do not want a social media algorithm to quietly make that choice for me. Algorithms do more than learn our preferences. Over time, they can begin to shape our identities, our assumptions, and even the way we understand the world. When our feeds become filled almost entirely with the things we already want to hear and see, everything outside that little world begins to feel suspicious. Eventually, we may start believing that the version of reality inside our feed is simply reality itself. And everything outside it must somehow be false.
When a Feed Becomes a Worldview
I think this is part of the reason polarization has become so severe around the world. When we encounter people who think differently from us, our first response is increasingly less likely to be:
Oh. I suppose someone could see it that way.
Instead, it becomes:
How could anyone be stupid enough to think that?
Difference turns quickly into contempt. And I do not think that happens only because people have become less tolerant. It also happens because we are being shown fewer and fewer people who genuinely think differently from us. Social media algorithms are often described as though they simply reflect our choices. I clicked this, therefore the system showed me more of it. I watched that, therefore it learned my taste. And yes, our behavior is part of the equation.
But an algorithm is not merely the final result of our preferences and beliefs. It is a system designed outside of us—a system built to influence what we see next, what keeps us engaged, and what we are most likely to click again. At some point, we stop asking why our feeds have become so one-sided. We simply accept them. We begin to believe:
This is my world. These are my beliefs. This is what people are really like.
And that is exactly what the people and companies that profit from these platforms want: for us to remain inside the world the system keeps serving back to us.
The black comedy Don’t Look Up captures something of this social dilemma too—the absurdity of a society in which reality itself becomes secondary to the narratives people have already chosen to consume.
Conviction Is Not the Same as Bias
Having strong convictions is not the same thing as being biased. In fact, I think a person with genuine conviction can often afford to be more open to other people. If I know what I believe and why I believe it, hearing an opposing view does not automatically threaten me.
Bias works differently. A biased person begins to believe that the world they inhabit is the whole world. Anything that does not fit inside it feels illegitimate. People who cannot escape that kind of thinking eventually begin labeling every piece of information they do not want to accept as “fake news.”
But the truth is that almost everything we encounter through television or the internet is already a mediated reality.
Someone selected it.
Someone framed it.
Someone edited it.
Someone decided what to include and what to leave out.
If we want to get closer to something real, perhaps we have to step outside the digital world once in a while.
The World Outside the Feed
Go outside.
Meet people offline.
Look directly into someone’s eyes.
Pay attention to the way they hesitate before answering.
Notice their expression, their tone, their posture, the context surrounding their words.
Try to understand not only what they think, but how they came to think that way.
Trace the places where you are different.
Then notice the places where you are unexpectedly the same.
And maybe, somewhere in that process, learn how people who disagree can still exist together without reducing one another to enemies. That kind of understanding is difficult to build through a feed. An algorithm does not show us a whole human being.
It shows us content.
A sentence.
A clip.
A headline.
An opinion stripped of the life surrounding it. And then it asks us to react.
Perhaps that is why deliberately disrupting our own algorithms matters. Every time I search for the other side on purpose, I am reminding the system that it does not get to define the borders of my world.
I want to decide what I read.
I want to decide what I question.
I want to decide which ideas are strong enough to keep and which ones deserve to be challenged.
The algorithm can make suggestions. It does not get to become my worldview.
Maybe intentionally tearing down the algorithmic walls around us—this strange, modern Tower of Babel we have helped build—is one of the few ways left to push back against a system that already feels larger than any individual user can control.
So I will keep breaking mine.
One search at a time.