Readings Assigned
- Bakshy, Eytan et al. – “Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook” – Published in http://science.sciencemag.org Science 05 Jun 2015:
348, Issue 6239, pp. 1130-1132 DOI: 10.1126/science.aaa1160 - Eslami, Motahhare et al.- “I always assumed that I wasn’t really that close to [her]”: Reasoning about invisible algorithms in the news feed” – Proceedings of CHI’15 (153-162)
Summary
The article and the paper both discuss how the Facebook notification feed is curated by an algorithm. The first article published in the science magazine talks about how a user of Facebook is exposed to diverse amount of news and opinion. The authors deduced that social median in fact do expose the users to ideologically diverse viewpoints. The authors of the second paper conducted a Facebook news feed case study comprising of 40 Facebook users. The users were from a diverse social as well as economic background. They classified the users as “aware” or “unaware” based on their knowledge of Facebook curation of the news feed which is based on an algorithm. The theme of this week’s reading was how users are influenced by the notification feed and how they react when knowing about the existence of the algorithm, their satisfaction level after being given a chance to see their unfiltered feed. Overall, it was found that the users were ultimately satisfied about the way the news feed was curated by the algorithm. All of them became more aware of the algorithm. Th experiment changed the the way they used and interacted with posts as that decision was a much informed one.
Reflection
It is true that computer algorithm exposes us to content which sometimes do influence our ideology, beliefs and the way we perceive an issue. The only question that comes to my mind is, are algorithms reliable? We know that algorithms are used in almost all things we do on the internet. I read an article on how United Airlines had overbooked a flight [1]. This led to more people possessing tickets than the number of seats available. Upon discovery of this, a passenger was removed forcibly from the plane. The reason that the airline company had given was that an algorithm had sorted through the passenger list and took in some parameters like the price of the ticket, if they were frequent flyer and the time of their check in. It had thus given the output that the passenger who was removed was one who was “least valuable” to them.
Additionally, algorithms are used profusely in each and every aspects of the internet. Social media’s news feeds are curated. The one thing that companies could potentially do to improve user awareness of the algorithmic existence is to inform users about them. I do not mean the endless “terms and conditions”. What I do mean is, like Facebook reminds one of all the memories, birthday, they can remind or notify about the algorithm. Since social media users are varied in education status and background, and that not all are from “computer science” background, it is the responsibility of the company to make sure users are “aware”.
Moreover, they can also provide more flexibility to users to filter the notification. I know that these are already in place but are a bit ambiguous. It depends on users indicating their preference against each post. However, such filtering should be made more user friendly and easy. Similar to how we filter amazon search results, something like that can be implemented in the homepage globally, not just against each post. It can be chronologically by default and customization on demand. Facebook in particular starts showing posts related to what we have recently liked or visited. This generally leads to the feed being monopolized with certain posts and that generally is one of the main reasons I am repelled by the platform. Advanced filtering setting could have these parameters as well to help users even more and allow users to customize rather than the algorithm choosing for us.
[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-age-of-the-algorithm/
