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When I talk about filters, I mean things like the following famous examples:

* When Facebook was founded, it was only for students at universities; one could only sign up for it with a college email address. Consequently, Facebook's early userbase was almost entirely college students – with all that implies for socioeconomic class.

* When G+ was founded, it was initially opened to Google employees, and used an invite code system for rollout, such that overwhelmingly its early users were people in the same social worlds as Googlers.

* In the heyday of USENET, the vast majority of internet users, at all, were college students who are majoring in technical topics.

These social spaces, consequently, inherited (in the object oriented sense) the social norms of the demographics that initially populated them.