Eslami, Motahhare, et al. “I always assumed that I wasn’t really that close to [her]: Reasoning about Invisible Algorithms in News Feeds.”
Bakshy, Eytan, Solomon Messing, and Lada A. Adamic. “Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook.”
SUMMARY
Both the papers deal with Facebook’s algorithm and how it influences people in its everyday life.
The first paper deals with the ‘hidden’ news feed curation algorithm employed by Facebook. Through a series of interviews, they do a qualitative analysis of:
- Algorithm Awareness – Whether users are aware that an algorithm is behind what they see on their news feed and how they found out about this
- Evaluation (user) of the algorithm – The study tested if the users thought that the algorithm was providing them with what they needed/wanted to see
- Algorithm Awareness to Future Behaviour – The study also asked their users if, after they discovered the algorithm and the possible parameters, if they tried to manipulate it in order to personalise their own view or to boost their posts on the platform
The second paper deals with how Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm’s bias leads to the platform being an echo chamber, i.e., where your ideas are going to reinforced with no challenges because you tend to engage with posts that you believe in.
REFLECTION
Eslami et al.’s work shows how a majority of users are unaware that an algorithm controls what they see on their newsfeed. In turn, they will believe that either Facebook is blocking them out or their friends are blocking them out. It is possible to personalize the Facebook feed extensively under News Feed Preferences – prioritize what we see first and the choice to unfollow people and groups. The issue with the feed algorithm is that the ‘unaware participants’ who form a large chunk of the population don’t know that they can tailor their experience. If it is let known, through more than a small header under settings, that an algorithm is tailoring the newsfeed, it would be more helpful and they are less likely to cause an outrage among their users. Placing the News Feed Preferences on either side of the newsfeed itself is a good option.
There was a recent rumour in January that had users believe that Facebook was limiting their feed to 25 friends. Many users were asked to copy-paste a message against this so that Facebook took notice and made alterations to their algorithm. Twitter has made sure that their newsfeed posts are in reverse-chronological order from followed accounts and occasionally the suggested tweets that is liked by someone else you follow. Reddit has two newsfeeds of sorts – best and hot. Best contains posts that are tailored to your tastes based on how you engaged with the posts, hot on the other hand shows the posts trending worldwide. This gives an eclectic and obvious mix, therefore, making sure it doesn’t become an echo-chamber.
Most recently, Zuckerberg had announced that Facebook’s goal was now not ‘helping you find relevant content’ but to ‘have more meaningful interactions’. Facebook tried the Reddit style two newsfeed model in an experiment. They removed posts from reputed media houses and placed them in an explore feed. This was to ensure that (the social media site) promoted interactions, i.e., increase organic content (not just those that were shared from other sites). They also hoped to do away with their platform acting like an echo chamber. This experiment was run in six small countries – Sri Lanka, Guatemala, Bolivia, Cambodia, Serbia and Slovakia. Following this major news sites in these countries (especially Bolivia and Guatemala) showed a sharp decrease in traffic. Unfortunately, this means that Facebook has become one of the biggest sources of news making it a ripe platform to spread fake news (for which, currently, it has limited or no checks).
However, I wonder how Facebook now is responsible for producing complete news, views from both sides. It began purely to support interactions between individuals and has evolved to its current form. Its role in news providing has not become entirely clear yet. However, as far as echo chambers go, this isn’t new. Print media, TV, talk show hosts – their ideologies influence the content they provide. People only tend to watch and enjoy shows that agree with them in general.
