Category: Vocab

Opinion corridor (Swedish: åsiktskorridor, Norwegian: meningskorridor) refers to a sociopolitical phenomenon that has been observed during the beginning of the 21st century in Sweden, and to some extent also in Norway. The expression itself was originally used in 2013 by Henrik Oscarsson (sv), professor in political science at the University of Gothenburg, as a metaphor for the limits of what’s commonly accepted to debate.[1][2]

The concept is similar to the Overton window, which assumes a sliding scale of legitimate political conversation, and to Hallin’s spheres, which assumes that the press implicitly groups issues into questions of wide consensus, legitimate controversy, and deviance. The Swedish Language Council has included the word åsiktskorridor in its 2014 list of neologisms.[1]

In February 2015, Expressen editor Ann-Charlotte Marteus (sv) published an apology for being part of “constructing a corridor that prevented a constructive debate about migration and integration”. She wrote that it was something that she started doing around 2002, when language tests were being debated and the Sweden Democrats started to become more influential. She was also afraid that Sweden’s political climate would become more similar to that of Denmark.[4]

Sweden didn’t become like Denmark, thank goodness. Maybe the opinion corridor helped. But the price was high: widespread self-censorship, a fear to examine reality objectively, a diminished belief in the power of arguments. And as a result a dumbed-down public, moral-panicked politicians and social problems that should have gotten attention and been dealt with a long time ago. It proved to be an expensive corridor.

— Ann-Charlotte Marteus, Expressen, 24 May 2015[4]

We live in a time where it’s considered brave to think freely, despite that it’s not forbidden.

— Alice Teodorescu, Göteborgs-Posten, 6 March 2015[6]

A filter bubble – a term coined by Internet activist Eli Pariser – is a state of intellectual isolation[1] 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.[2][3][4] As a result, users become separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoints, effectively isolating them in their own cultural or ideological bubbles.[5] 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[6] and addressable.[7] 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,[8][9] and as a result have called into question the effects of the “filter bubble” phenomenon on user exposure to fake news and echo chambers,[10] spurring new interest in the term,[11] with many concerned that the phenomenon may harm democracy.[12][13][11]

(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[14]