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If you were surprised by the result of the Brexit vote in the UK or by the Trump victory in the US, you might live in an echo chamber - a self-reinforcing world of people who share the same opinions as you. Echo chambers are a problem, and not just because it means some people make incorrect predictions about political events. They threaten our democratic conversation, splitting up the common ground of assumption and fact that is needed for diverse people to talk to each other. A few tools are mentioned in the post that help you see "the other side" of a story - you might like to play with them, e.g. http://politecho.org "is a browser extension that shows the political biases of your friends and Facebook newsfeed"

We learned this week that the Trump campaign may have tried to dissuade millions of Black voters from voting in 2016 through highly targeted online ads. The investigation, by Channel 4, highlighted a still little-understood online advertising technique, microtargeting. This targets ads at people based on the huge amount of data available about them online. Experts say Big Tech needs to be much more transparent about how microtargeting works, to avoid overblown claims but also counter a potential threat to democracy.