Facts, Filter Bubbles, and Public Health

Judging by my Facebook feed last week, Elizabeth Warren was the front runner in the presidential election and perhaps a metaphysical certainty to win the Democratic nomination. With the exception of a few outlying Sanders supporters, almost everybody I know supported her. My news feed was filled with proud “I Voted for Elizabeth” selfies and stickers. For weeks, all the news stories shared on my feed touted Warren’s strengths as a candidate, and anybody who criticized her was rapidly shouted down by a chorus of her true believers.

I am still amazed that she did not win most or all of the states on Super Tuesday. How could almost everybody I know, and everybody who knows everybody I know, be so wrong?

Could it be, perhaps, that I am an upper-middle-class liberal white professional with a Humanities Ph.D. and a 20-year career on college campuses? That most of my friends are professors, writers, or left-leaning attorneys? That almost everybody I know looks like Elizabeth Warren or a member of her immediate family while most of the country doesn’t?

Yeah, that would do it.

I dramatically overestimated Warren’s appeal because I get a lot of my news through what media-observers call a “filter bubble,” or a news feed that has been carefully tailored and refined to reflect the moral, cultural, and aesthetic…