Should Algorithms Control How We Communicate?

(Huffington Post, 2016)

For several years now, Facebook has used an algorithm to sort how posts appear in a given user’s News Feed. This means that instead of showing posts in reverse-chronological order, the way Twitter does, Facebook’s algorithm decides whether a certain post should be quickly buried or whether it should stay near the top of a user’s News Feed even as new posts vie for attention. Learning to game this algorithm has long been of interest to advertisers, content creators, and other organizations who maintain a presence on Facebook and want their links and posts to be viewed as much as possible.

A recent Buzzfeed article, “How I Cracked Facebook’s New Algorithm And Tortured My Friends”, shows that it’s possible to keep a post at the top of someone’s Facebook feed for weeks on end simply by generating a lot of comments on it. The article’s author did this by posting a link to a particularly obnoxious video, which prompted her friends to comment about how awful it was, but the Facebook algorithm took these comments to mean that the video was discussion-worthy, and that more people should see it. The longer this awful video stayed at the top of her friends’ News Feeds, the more annoyed they grew, prompting even more engagement to trick the algorithm into thinking it was relevant.

While this may seem like a fun way to prank your friends, it has some profound implications for the way Facebook affects communication. First, it can amplify the influence of people who already have a wide circle of friends – someone with a thousand friends can more easily generate a lot of comments and keep her posts visible, while someone with a few dozen friends might struggle to be noticed by them. This exact situation happened with tragic results to one user who posted that he was in the hospital recently, but died before any of his friends saw the update in their feed.

Beyond disrupting personal relationships this way, the flaws in Facebook’s algorithmic sorting open the door for large-scale manipulation. As Phil notes in a recent post on this blog, fake news is a real problem, and the tools for pushing misleading posts to the forefront are getting easier to use.

A return to a purely chronological News Feed seems like the most intuitive solution – after all, most real life conversations aren’t constantly interrupted by one party bringing up the same topic every day for weeks on end – but this might not work well for people who don’t log in very often. Facebook has some business reasons for its algorithm being the way it is, but as communications students, the effect it has on discourse is worrying, whether it means breaking down communication between friends or reducing the public’s ability to responsibly inform itself.

References

Harsh, A. (2016). Facebook Replaced Journalists With An Algorithm And We Are To Blame. Retrieved February 18, 2018, from https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/facebook-replaced-journalists-with-an-algorithm-and_us_57c4fbcae4b024fca58cc9db

Notopoulos, K. (2018). How I Cracked Facebook’s New Algorithm And Tortured My Friends. Retrieved February 15, 2018, from https://www.buzzfeed.com/katienotopoulos/how-i-cracked-facebooks-new-algorithm-and-tortured-my

Robertson, A. (2017). What happens when Facebook doesn’t tell you a friend has died? Retrieved February 17, 2018, from https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/19/16796078/facebook-friend-death-post-algorithm-problems

Warzel, C. (2018). He Predicted The 2016 Fake News Crisis. Now He’s Worried About An Information Apocalypse. Retrieved February 18, 2018, from https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/the-terrifying-future-of-fake-news