-- Am I Living in a No-Go Zone? -- Bursting the Filter Bubble With the Needle of Reality –

(Technologies such as social media) lets you go off with like-minded people, so you're not mixing and sharing and understanding other points of view ... It's super important. It's turned out to be more of a problem than I, or many others, would have expected.

— Bill Gates 2017 in Quartz

Recently I came across a disturbing article here on Steemit. It’s called “So for 2 years the media has been bashing Trump's wall and Travel Ban. Just watch Europe, Part III: Shariah Law NO-GO Zones”.

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I believe its purpose is to warn Americans for the dangers of immigration, by taking the situation in Europe as an example. This interested me, because in my experience it’s not that big of a problem, but since I’m not all knowing and also our mainstream media tends to picture a one sided version of reality as well, there could be something that I’ve missed and that I could learn from this outsiders perspective!

So I started reading:

"The zones where islamic law is enforced with no control from homeland enforcement, are called NO-GO Zones. Police has lost control of those neighborhoods and can’t guarantee security inside them, denouncing that crimes go unpunished: intimidation, extortion, harassment, sexual abuse, robbery, attacks with violence, and more. These zones are dominated by mafia gangs and, in consequence, young delinquents are an easy catch to ISIS recruiters.
These ethnic enclaves, whose population does not seek to adapt to the country in which it is located, but rather the country has to adapt to them, are nourishing themselves from Sharia, engendering jihadists."

Okey wow, this is pretty serious! So apparently in Europe we have already lost control over some parts of our cities and these parts are now dominated by mafia gangs. Yeah that’s really bad and I definitely don’t want to go there! So where are these no-go zones? All over Europe: England, Germany, France but also in my own beloved Netherlands:

In 2015, the courts forced the government of the Netherlands to publish the list of 40 NO-GO Zones

Together with this diagram:

And then it hit me: OMG I’M LIVING IN ONE OF THOSE NO-GO ZONES!! You can probably all imagine me bursting into panic and facing a mental breakdown; That I wanted to hide, but there’s nowhere to go if your home is where the heart of all trouble is!! But this was not the case. We Dutch are brave as lions, so I faced the world and the world faced me. We had a stare down for like 20 seconds, until I figured this was going nowhere I decided to think logically and do a little factcheck.

For In my experience this neighbourhood (I live next to a mosque) has its problems, there may be some more criminality than on average, it’s hard to park your car when the mosque is full, but this is nothing like a no-go zone, dominated by shariah or mafia. In fact I get along pretty well with the Muslims here. It’s annoying that your not able to buy ham at their shops, but other than that they have nice food (and cheap!). They are generally friendly and always ready to give you a helping hand. I’m even doing business with Muslims, as I provide them with some copywriting services (since Dutch is very different from Arabic languages, so they need help in this). Also keep in mind that firearms are only carried by the police and military here.

So where did this information come from? Did courts really force the government to publish this list in 2015? I couldn’t find it anywhere (on Google, search for ‘no go zones Netherlands’), just a lot of websites linking to each other and finally links that don’t exist. I did find the diagram, on the other hand . As you can see this is posted in 2009, when RTL, a news site, published a list of 20 problem neighbourhoods and this website Geenstijl (infotainment website) called them no-go zones.

So that’s four facts wrong in one fact:

• No courts were involved, not even the government. It was a news site that published this list.
• This was in 2009, not 2015.
• There are 20 areas, not 40.
• These are problem neighbourhoods, not no-go zones. Calling a problem neighbourhood a no-go zone is like calling painkillers hard drugs. There’s a huge exaggeration here.

Confronting the author with these facts, and asking where he got this from he replied:

I post data based on blogs, news outlets and alternative media. It is your right to believe or not, showing your reasons or facts.

Also he edited the article, which is really nice. Also keep in mind I’m not trying to offend anyone, just trying to improve the world like everybody else. But here’s the thing. This is some serious message that is put out there. Europe is plunged into chaos, and Americans should fear the same if the immigrants are not stopped as soon as possible. Now I don’t know for the no-go zones in other European countries, it might be true that their no go zones are worse, but if the only fact I can check is just shit piled on other shit (a pile of shit), how credible is the rest of this story? The author bases his facts on blogs news outlets and alternative media, but how credible are these? At least credible enough to keep linking to and quoting each other…

Also read some of the comments on this:

"Islam is a religion of peace," my ass...

EU is just collection of financial entities without any governing aptitutde or interest that is turning Europe into magnified Somalia.

Yeesh: I had no idea how bad it's getting in Europe.

The problems are now crystal clear. The question is what can be done about this disaster and the overtaking of the world?

For these commenters it’s very credible indeed. It's even 'crystal clear'. But it’s simply (at least partially) not true! So what’s going on?

I believe this is a perfect example of the filter bubble in effect:

A filter bubble is a state of intellectual isolation that can result from personalized searches when a website algorithm selectively guesses what information a user would like to see based on information about the user, such as location, past click-behavior and search history. As a result, users become separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoints, effectively isolating them in their own cultural or ideological bubbles. The choices made by these algorithms are not transparent. Prime examples include Google Personalized Search results and Facebook's personalized news-stream. The bubble effect may have negative implications for civic discourse, according to Pariser, but contrasting views regard the effect as minimal and addressable. The surprising results of the U.S. presidential election in 2016 have been associated with the influence of social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, and as a result have called into question the effects of the "filter bubble" phenomenon on user exposure to fake news and echo chambers, spurring new interest in the term, with many concerned that the phenomenon may harm democracy.

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So if let’s say, you believe immigration is bad and Islam is dangerous (which is debatable), and you google some information on this, ‘like’ some articles here and there and follow Steemians that hold these opinions as well, your ‘filters’ will be set so that you will mostly find content that confirms the opinion you are already having, thus that Islam is destroying society. Now with every confirmation you’ll get more and more convinced of the truth of this particular statement, until you take it as the truth. The only truth, because there appears to be no other one.

But this is a fallacy. More confirmation doesn’t make a statement more true. It just doesn’t prove it false. Actually this sort of confirmation has nothing to do with reality at all. Let us here remind what Karl Popper once wrote:

In so far as a (scientific) statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.

Sensible statements must be falsifiable! For falsification, you need reality, you need to step out of the bubble. Check the facts, go out there, challenge your own views and beliefs by visiting a pro-immigration website, buy another newspaper, view another ones feed here on Steemit, watch al Jazeera, watch the Dutch news, ask the locals, get informed!

This also works the other way around, not only are you able to burst your own bubble with the needle of (another) reality, you can also burst someone else, the way I just did for in the discussion concerning no-go zones in the Netherlands. Moreover, I realize that I still could be wrong, but now all of you have the opportunity to show me so and possibly open up new horizons to me as well.

Democracy needs well informed citizens. The right to vote implies the duty to stay informed. No one has the absolute truth at his disposal, but we need a lively discussion between people that hold different opinions, but nonetheless live in the same world. Living in a bubble, disconnected from reality doesn’t make you qualified to enter any debate. So please wake up a burst your bubble!!

It’s pretty funny if you think of it. Those living in a bubble, believing that the end of the world is near are actually quite literally ending the world for themselves, by disconnecting from it.

Roy

PS America has no go zones as well, lol

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