I’ve been reading a lot about Facebook and possible soon-to-come Twitter algorithms recently and it’s a bit frightening.
You probably know – although maybe not – that your Facebook news stream is ranked. According to a 2013 article by Facebook itself, the newsfeed algorithm responds to what you do, including things like:
- How often you interact with the friend, page, or public figure (like an actor or journalist) who posted
- The number of likes, shares and comments a post receives from the world at large and from your friends in particular
- How much you have interacted with this type of post in the past
- Whether or not you and other people across Facebook are hiding or reporting a given post
So what does that mean? You may be totally in the dark if a friend whom you rarely interact with posts something HUGE. Because it simply won’t show up. Being out the loop on social matters is one thing, but if people are using Facebook for their news, that’s another thing altogether. Net neutrality is something we should care about.
Coincidentally, last week, there was a great piece in The Guardian that suggested Facebook was for fun – think the ALS ice bucket challenge – and Twitter was for news. If you know me on Facebook (well, if you interact with me regularly!), you may remember that I posted a link to a blog post by Zeynep Tufekci that explained why the tragic shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri first showed up on Twitter, long before Facebook. It was certainly my experience, as tweets showed up on, and then took over, my Twitter feed, but not my Facebook feed. Surely, I thought, some of my friends would be talking about it. But nothing – or at least nothing that the algorithm thought I should see.
With that in mind, and my increasing interest in understanding what’s at work, I started looking at Facebook profiles of some of my less-than-close friends. And sure enough, they were posting things that I had never seen. Those two experiences made up what was probably one of the first times I really noticed the power of the algorithm at work. So when Twitter suggested last week that it may introduce a similar “filter” algorithm, I wasn’t surprised it had many up in arms. Net neutrality seems to be taking another hit.
I’m the first to admit that these days, I get most of my “breaking news” from my Twitter feed, so this has me a little nervous too, but at least it’s not my only source of news. I still can’t start the day without a cup of coffee and an old-fashioned newspaper!
Now I’m not naive. I know news has been curated from the beginning of time and that what one newspaper editor, TV or radio news director thinks is news is not what another one does. So it is filtered. But I like to think that by at least skimming through the whole newspaper (well, maybe not the sports section!), I’m getting a relatively broad overview.
But what of people who ONLY get their news from social media. How much are they missing? And is it right to only have the opportunity to see the news that “big brother” thinks you’re interested in? I worry that narrows your world down so far that you may cease to grow.
How many of us of a certain age remember serendipitously stumbling across a piece of information that had a big impact on the way we thought about the world? Whether it changed us for a day, a week, or forever, it was important. How easy is that these days?
My son tells me I’m nuts, and that it’s really easy to stumble across news and information you didn’t know you were interested in on sites like Reddit. Self-proclaimed as the front page of the intranet, it has thousands of “subReddits” – essentially conversation groups of different interest groups. In fact, my son wonders how we used to find information without the ease of the intranet!
I hope he’s right, because being open to new information, new ideas and new views is what keeps us growing as individuals. Certain age or not, I don’t want to only learn more deeply about things I already know, I also want to learn widely about things I don’t yet know are fascinating – for a long time to come.
