Escaping the Google Filter Bubble on Twitter

Recently I noticed more and more that my Twitter timeline is full with Google stuff and almost just Google stuff. Every announcement, every rumour, everything Google got hyped in my timeline and I got sick of it. I was locked in a Google filter bubble.

That made me go through the list of people I follow and detect that I followed a lot of people either working at Google or being Google Developer Experts (that’s like working for Google but not receiving a salary by them, right?). I spent some minutes and unfollowed most of them.

I was pretty interested into all things Android some years ago, I’m still responsible for managing AndroidPub, probably the biggest Medium publication for Android Developers, and develop Teleposter, a wrapper app for Telegra.ph by Telegram in my free time. But other than that I’m not that enthusiastic about Google anymore. Google plays a huge role in surveillance capitalism (making money by selling your data), but I don’t want to support that and try to avoid Google as much as possible. (But that’s another topic, I should write about.) On a side note: Google is also not very good to developers these days, terminates developer accounts on Google Play without any reasons and has no direct way to contact a human at Google to appeal (just one example here).

Unfollowing so many people (my follow count went down from more than 400 to 149 at the time of writing) has multiple positive effects:

I read way less Google stuff (like who else is going to Google I/O this year too), but more interesting things from all over technology.

I use Twitter less, because there’s simply less going on. But when I use Twitter, most often there are new interesting topics to discover.

I use the mute option more and just cut people out of my timeline with whose opinion I absolutely can’t agree and which make me angry. I don’t want to get angry.

I would like to escape Twitter altogether too and just be in the Fediverse (the network of decentralized social networks), but Twitter is currently the only option to follow some people who share stuff that interests me and keep in touch with people I got to know there over the 4 years since I’m registered on this platform.

By the way: From now on I try to blog more again, feel free to send me some ideas for topics, you want me to talk about, via the contact form on my website.

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