Okay, not exactly. But let me explain.
For a while, after the first several months I had been updating the Planet Waves blog with news items and I felt like I was really in the swing of things, I discovered that Facebook could be a treasure trove of links and leads.
I often heard important headlines on programs like Democracy Now! and All Things Considered, but the Facebook feed brought me a new angle on stories of the curious, the unjust and the uplifting. Best of all, some of these items came from people whose views might not quite match mine, or who lived elsewhere in the world and therefore had easy access to different sources and perspectives.
It seemed to work great for a while, but as I was asked to work on other projects, my news-sniffing slowed and I let a slight shift in the blog’s rhythm become a bit bigger than intended. Then about a month ago, I encountered two interviews with Eli Pariser: one on The Diane Rehm Show on NPR, the other on Democracy Now! The former executive director of MoveOn.org has written a book called The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. As I listened, it dawned on me that I haven’t been seeing the same variety of posts in my News Feed for a while; that they haven’t had the same cultural/political weight; that I’d forgotten some people were even on my list of friends.
In both interviews, Pariser covers the ground he turns over in his book: that not only Facebook, but Google and Yahoo! and MSN are all using algorithms to decide what you want to see — and, in a sense, who you are. Most of us know that Facebook decides what the most ‘popular’ stories are from our friends and gives them priority, even when they are a few days old. You can get around this to some extent by clicking the “Most Recent” option on your Home feed. But what I did not know was the degree to which Facebook uses our habits in clicking ‘like’ on friends posts to determine which friends you see at all. Pariser recounts how he very purposefully ‘friended’ people who hold vastly different views from his own — because he believes discourse with opposing views is the only way to really learn and to diffuse polarization — only to find them disappear from his news feeds. As though Facebook was saying, ‘We know you don’t really like them’.
Pariser makes an excellent point about the ‘like’ function on Facebook, taken from the Democracy Now! interview:
Take news about the war in Afghanistan. When you talk to people who run news websites, they’ll tell you stories about the war in Afghanistan don’t perform very well. They don’t get a lot of clicks. People don’t flock to them. And yet, this is arguably one of the most important issues facing the country. But it will never make it through these filters. And especially on Facebook this is a problem, because the way that information is transmitted on Facebook is with the ‘like’ button. And the ‘like’ button, it has a very particular valence. It’s easy to click ‘like’ on ‘I just ran a marathon’ or ‘I baked a really awesome cake.’ It’s very hard to click ‘like’ on ‘war in Afghanistan enters its 10th year.’
He makes the point that Facebook also needs, say, an ‘important’ button, and this is something within the scope for users to push for. I know I have often held back from ‘liking’ an important story; it feels incredibly wrong to click ‘like’ when the posted headline is blaring about a 12-year-old boy being tortured to death during the Syrian protests. But apparently simply sharing the story may not have the same algorithmic weight.
Unfortunately, Google is not immune to this kind of type-casting and cherry-picking when it comes to news. Pariser conducted two experiments, once with a search for stories about BP and the other for stories about Egypt during the uprising there. He had two friends search Google simultaneously, and was amazed by the difference in stories offered. One person’s top ten links had to to with the Gulf spill, the other got only BP stock tips; one person was shown stories about the protests happening that day in Tahrir square, the other only travel websites about the pyramids. Google was originally supposed to be this democratic news server. But it too is now programmed to decide who it thinks you are, what you want to see, and then give that to you in the first page of hits — knowing most people apparently only click the top three results they get. Yahoo! News and MSN apparently do the same thing.
So we’re actually running in smaller and smaller circles of information-sharing despite the wider and wider cyber networks we’re plugging into. I agree with Pariser: this phenomenon has some pretty unnerving implications and it’s not too late to become aware of how invisibly our experience of online information is being shaped. We can ask for that ‘important’ button en masse, scroll deeper into our Google hits, make a point of ‘liking’ important posts while adding a comment to explain. As with virtually everything else in our world, awareness and conscious use are key. It takes energy and effort; unfortunately, we truly cannot rely on transparency in any media — even the wide-open field of user-generated content. Facebook and Google and their programmers are not inherently evil. It’s just that their aim is to get us to spend as much time using their social media platforms as possible. And that generally means making sure we’re having a good time.
Pariser remarks on this lack of concern for civil responsibility on the part of these social media companies (again from Democracy Now!; The Diane Rehm Show does not seem to have a transcript):
You know, I had a brief conversation with Larry Page, in which he said, “Well, I don’t think this is a very interesting problem.” And that was about that. But, you know, further down in Google, there are a bunch of people who are wrestling with this. I think the challenge is — I talked to one Facebook engineer who sort of summed it up quite well, and he said, “Look, what we love doing is sitting around and coming up with new clever ways of getting people to spend more minutes on Facebook, and we’re very good at that. And this is a much more complicated thing that you’re asking us to do, where you’re asking us to think about sort of our social responsibility and our civic responsibility, what kind of information is important. This is a much more complicated problem. We just want to do the easy stuff.”
“We just want to do the easy stuff.” You know, I can’t really blame him too much — after all, “wanting to do the easy stuff” was, admittedly, a factor in my use of Facebook as a source of cool things to post here. But I am aware of my function as editor here: that I have influence (though by no means sole control) over what Planet Waves offers beyond astrology, within the evolving guidelines set by the site’s creator and editor in chief. Pariser says of these invisible filters, “These algorithms do the same thing that the human editors do. They just do it much less visibly and with much less accountability.” Visibility and accountability count for a lot. And when you begin understanding the government’s use of the information we volunteer, as Pariser mentions, (and that which we do not volunteer with knowledge), the issues of visibility and accountability take on darker shades and a keener edge.
Eric is fond of saying the first rule of journalism is, “Know what you don’t know.” That is, be aware when there are holes in your knowledge and blind spots as you investigate anything. Again, Pariser speaks to this necessity as we navigate online news and social media:
I think, in the long run, you know, there’s sort of two things that need to happen here. One is, we need, ourselves, to understand better what’s happening, because it’s very dangerous when you have these kinds of filters operating and you don’t know what they’re ruling out that you’re not even seeing. That’s sort of a — that’s where people make bad decisions, is, you know, what Donald Rumsfeld called the “unknown unknowns,” right? And this creates a lot of unknown unknowns. You don’t know how your experience of the world is being edited.
I never thought I’d be taking a cue from Donald Rumsfeld. But I think i’m going to try to get to know some “unknown unknowns” sooner rather than later.
Im in the process of decontaminating myself from FB, i would say ‘leaving’ but decontamination feels much more approriate they really do make it difficult for you to purge yourself out of the system.
I wish i could be shocked about your story of FB manipulation but im not – they have been manipulating data to greater and greater levels for a long time, maybe im just a wannabe luddite who fears social networking, ive certainly never been as ‘crack whorish’ about using it as most of my friends and its not just FB thats bad, as you said, Google has been picked up for using similar techniques to only bring up ‘relavent’ search results, but i have to be a realist – i can wean myself off social networking very easily, Google is another matter.
Still dont really understand why PW needs a platform on FB when it has such an active website but hey…I also dont understand why people feel the need to run 3 compartmentalised blogs about various things they do alongside their tweets, FB, email and ‘live’ chat – If a Gemini Ascendant with Mercury as her ruling planet thinks its all too much and a waste of energy…its probably too much!
I heard about this issue and Pariser on the BBC I believe it was, about 3 weeks ago. The algorithm must not like me too much, since I access FB about once every month or so. I’m about ready to pull the plug anyway, as it’s too much of a timesuck.
Frequencies of fb usage, congruence in either geography and/or culture, types of post congruences (say like YouTube) as well as likes, comments, frequency of profile page visits etc all provide analytic data that can become meaningful information.
A cyber-self could probably be delineated from people’s web trail audit – this is similar to buyers using credit cards that reveal product acquisition history and broader patterns – even down to one’s geographical or cyber-location when making purchases. Everything leaves a trail. The fact that this is analysed and thoroughly utilised is sensible.
Interestingly, even an algorithm makes choices – no different to humans, uses selective criteria, again no different to humans. This is all just natural and technology just makes the number crunching scope vast. That’s a matter of scale and awesome news and certainly no big…
What may be of interest is looking at one’s own values and how these algorithms reflect them. However, if one of our values involves the importance we consider cyberspace to have, then it means we are into a theme of cyber-trust. Maybe it is easier to trust a program, however (it is more consistent than any human, non-capricious, non-vindictive etc and would seem to discriminate ‘publicity-worthy’ solely on the basis of analytically measurable, mass interest).
Now, if they were screening via categories like “political and perhaps controversial”, instead of via popular desires of “fickle and fun loving” web surfers, I’d be deeply concerned. Facebook now has permalinks – and you COULD get intimidated (many folk do!) but once you set foot in cyberspace we must concede self as essentially encodable data – one huge pattern that a computer program can penetrate, like no human brain has the capacity to map. It’s the price we pay. Did you realise that fully?
I’d like to think that if I’m watching closely then this ‘audit trail accumulation’ being quantified will reflect something back TO/AT me and ultimately set up the equation “more transparent=less vulnerable” rather than the fear-driven “more expressive=more vulnerable”.
Ways will always be required to parse data. So what? The key will prove in the long run to be one of craft and skill; know the technology; developing the ability to wield it goes a long way and gives the information you wish to put out there a slingshot boost.
The algorithm is your friend – so get to know it well!! For omission is NOT censorship… unless it is deliberate.
Logically therefore, let us help fashion the unpopular into the popular in cyber mode – just as when we attempt the same in 3 dimensions..
Uranus be praised! 🙂
7T:
yeah, Google used to be the s**. still, I use it. sometimes it’s amusing seeing my ‘custom’ ads that come up- ha! that’s another good point, the whole drive to get.your.email. it also just gets exhausting going over people’s privacy policy etc. faaa!
ahhhhh. yah. in the end, I don’t take the paranoid route either. not a good use of Energy.
time to check on & tend wilting plants, inc. myself!!
take it easy-
peace.
I remember when they first began to implement this function. It drove me up the wall. I chose google over and above other search engines because others , MSN being the absolute worst in giving me results so far removed from what I was searching for.
I remember thinking to myself how can Microsoft allow the search engine they provide to be so ass backwards. When I research I know from the start that I will be digging through material extensively and this I don’t mind , but when results are so far removed to be rediculous its laughable..
Google was a godsend giving the best results for what I sought.
Unfortunately this all changed and this was not only frustrating but I was dissapointed as well at the fact that once again a system of integrity has sold out becoming sloppy shit..
I’ve since learned to work around this although at times it becomes very challanging ..
I have never liked Facebook due to the fact of its insistance that you sign up and the tricks and ploys it uses to get you to do just this.. Not for me .. Left me with a bad feeling and I’m not the type to be of a paranoid nature about the internet , just the opposite..
The idea of content being blocked despite being sent me by the owner of this content but being told I must sign up to view it just left a bad taste .. I believe the reasons given for this was for protection of the clients.. Yea Right.. such Bulls**t
I’m not paranoid it was just the principle of it..
that’s pretty crazy- isn’t it?
it doesn’t surprise me that any supposed ‘convenience’ provided by any type of large entity (even the seemingly innocuous) is really an opportunity for them to manipulate what you do or where you go…trail generally ending up to where they get a kickback for your attention..or $$..you know, web traffic is a commodity, huge.
hmm. reminds me of a specific cagey way to funnel people in an “apparent” ever-increasing sameness of information. we have the shock doc prod on one hand, and then when you get sick & tired and bored of that, well, we can just direct you indirectly to sameness of information we want you to keep hearing, reading, talking with etc. over & over, blahhh
see,,,our ideas really ARE what is going on. hmm. yah. new definition of ‘customized’ needed…my ‘custom ride’. ha!! that would be a steed w/ real licorice tucked away in the forelock… yum!
this plays to that question of the Inter- being friend (web) or foe (net) (of course depending upon what you’re looking for) …remember that guy drawing madly all over the dry erase board??
for me, goes back to the Core. to one’s own core. Values. Choices…(oh I know, over&over)
knowing the Game, what Game, and if, when, why, how and with whom you wanna play..
man, I feel for ya though, it is a tough biz to be thoughtfully providing legitimate, relevant, socio-political news…tough! mad world, constantly gotta be out there with the magnifying glass, checking shit out. I mean just reading what you have to go through to ‘get to the facts’ takes incredible time and energy…you must feel like an undercover agent or spy or something…and that’s on multiple pieces a day!!! crazy!
huge respect for you. has anyone else thought about this??geez, I know I can spend hours looking up and diving into something..
that is a massive undertaking! I appreciate your diligence and work ethic, really. incredible. and then assimilating & negotiating that whole cosmos of media and current events with the Cosmos…tying it all together AP-style? ( that does NOT stand for Assoc. Press) it’s incredible. I know I’ve said this before and apparently it bears repeating, because, well, I just repeated it. smile. really, I am grateful, I don’t have time to dig around for news, I have other digging to do, and it involves my ear to the ground.
just needed to express OUT LOUD what a great watering hole PW can be and I, and many many others, really appreciate what you are doing here (esp. those of us in a drought-state.) I’m loving the mid-year reports BTW. it’s like a private reading 12x over!! will be listening to the Whole Thing. the zodiac is a wheel. and this Sadge needs complete circles…Oh, and the Daily Astrology is awesomely connecting the goings-on chart/ephemeris–wise w/ the Sky??heaven…I envision the masses padding outside in the wee hours barefoot…and looking Up….nice!!
alright. over and out. just checking in & giving a shout out to the brilliant work here, just some comment-fan-mail–I’m sure you’re sick of it by now, but you need to know PW Staff.
it’s not easy Being On the Leading Edge……
in the Spirit of Spirit,
someone who gets it.
peace.
Thanks! This topic was on a TED talk recently that was linked to a posted blog on PW so I thought “everyone” knew about this. How do you think we can campaign for an “Important” button? That is a great idea. Without being able to hear other points of view there is no hope for understanding and peace, it seems to me. (((Amanda)))
oh, i don’t think the FB execs or programmers care about how many catfights there are — the more traffic, the better. i definitely recommend checking out one of the interviews i link to in full. it’s fascinating stuff.
…and do I recall that in journalism classes you are taught that the more worrisome news is printed deep in the papers on Friday afternoon because everyone is too busy to read the paper or check the internet on Friday night? There’s more than algorithms at work here, but the algorithms probably help keep down the catfights on Facebook, and nastygrams back to FB owners. Most business types don’t want to be bothered with things like the Agenda 21 hysteria that i’ve seen going around. But your government is more than happy to shellac the truth as needed to continue robbing the treasury or whatever.