PAPERS:
- Eslami et al., ““ I always assumed that I wasn’t really that close to [ her ]”: Reasoning about invisible algorithms in the news feed,” 2015.
Bakshy, “Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook,” vol. 348, no. 6239, pp. 1130–1133, 2015.
SUMMARY:
The first paper deals with Facebook’s ‘algorithm’ and how it’s operations are opaque and yet the power they posess in influencing user’s feeds and thereby virtual interactions and perhaps opinions. Using FeedVis, they do a longitudinal study of the algorithm and how the awareness of the algorithm influences the way people interact with Facebook and feel satisfied or otherwise.
The second platform deals with the algorithm’s nature to make the platform, an echo chamber owing to the homophilly patterns among users with a certain ideologies or opinions.
REFLECTION:
- The paper itself mentions and I agree, that the results from the FeedVis study were logitudinal and more knowledge about the user patterrns could be achieved by taking into account ethnography and how the algorithm works for different for different users.
- Another factor which the paper briefly touches upon is that the users try to speculate about this ‘opaque’ algorithm and find ways to understand and ‘hack’ into the algorithms and thus the respective feeds of their followers.
- One such example is the entire YouTube and Instagram community trying to constantly figure out the algorithms of the respected platforms and adjusting their activities online in accordance with those.
- Further, the lack of communication of such algorithms often demotes the feeling of a community among users and thereby affecting the user ‘patriotism’ towards the platform.
- This was observed in the YouTube Demonitization case where several YouTubers, due to lack of effective communication from YouTube, felt less important and thus changed their online activities.
- Furthermore, I would have liked if these studies were conducted in today’s times, mentioning Dark Posts or Unpublished Posts and how the ‘algorithm’ treats them and how is bolsters the homophily (often political) in users.
- The use of Dark Posts is very unethical as it promotes the ‘echo chambers’ on social media sites. Not only that, the users, differing in ideologies to a certain demographic will not even see the post organically due to the “unpublished ness” of the post. Allegedly, even a link to that post will not take a user to that post if the user’s interests have been profiled different from the targeted audience of the Dark Post. Dark Posts can not only be used for targeted marketing but also for certain other unethical areas. [1]
[1] – http://adage.com/article/digital/facebook-drag-dark-posts-light-election/311066/
