{"id":40827,"date":"2011-06-28T14:47:32","date_gmt":"2011-06-28T18:47:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=40827"},"modified":"2011-06-28T15:41:29","modified_gmt":"2011-06-28T19:41:29","slug":"facebook-ate-my-planet-waves-news-sources","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/by-amanda-painter\/facebook-ate-my-planet-waves-news-sources\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook ate my Planet Waves news sources"},"content":{"rendered":"

Okay, not exactly. But let me explain. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Miscalculated algorithm or crafty marketing? I received this notice within 12 hours of posting several links to the ever-mysterious Facebook.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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<\/strong><\/a> on NPR, the other on Democracy Now!<\/strong><\/a> The former executive director of MoveOn.org has written a book called The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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<\/em> — and, in a sense, who you are<\/em>. 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<\/em>. 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<\/em> like them’. <\/p>\n

Pariser makes an excellent point about the ‘like’ function on Facebook, taken from the Democracy Now! interview: <\/p>\n

Take news about the war in Afghanistan. When you talk to people who run news websites, they\u2019ll tell you stories about the war in Afghanistan don\u2019t perform very well. They don\u2019t get a lot of clicks. People don\u2019t 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\u2019s easy to click ‘like’ on ‘I just ran a marathon’ or ‘I baked a really awesome cake.’ It\u2019s very hard to click ‘like’ on ‘war in Afghanistan enters its 10th year.’ <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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):<\/p>\n

You know, I had a brief conversation with Larry Page, in which he said, “Well, I don\u2019t 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 \u2014 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\u2019re very good at that. And this is a much more complicated thing that you\u2019re asking us to do, where you\u2019re 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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“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.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

I think, in the long run, you know, there\u2019s sort of two things that need to happen here. One is, we need, ourselves, to understand better what\u2019s happening, because it\u2019s very dangerous when you have these kinds of filters operating and you don\u2019t know what they\u2019re ruling out that you\u2019re not even seeing. That\u2019s sort of a \u2014 that\u2019s 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\u2019t know how your experience of the world is being edited.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":191,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1737],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40827"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/191"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40827"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40827\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}