 "Facebook, stop feeding us what we want to read")
Never before has my Facebook been as heated and dogmatic as during Trump versus Hillary.
An alarming number of statistics show that we are increasingly turning our backs on traditional newspapers, and instead relying on social media for our news.
For those that are unfamiliar, Facebook uses an algorithm for your newsfeed that focuses on a number of variables like:
• How often you interact with the friend, page, or public figure who posted the story.
• The number of “likes”, shares, and comments a post received from the world at large, and from your friends in particular.
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• How much you have interacted with this type of post in the past (both format and content).
This algorithm scans and collects everything you’ve posted in the past week by each of your friends, everyone you follow, each group you belong to, and every Facebook Page you have ever liked.
Facebook, and even Google, actively curate feeds that they then feed to us. As a result, the extreme become more extreme as they read and consume thoughts and opinions that support their own.
Are we doing 'curation' right?
If our newsfeed displayed a greater variety of opinions, would one be as staunchly pro-Trump or pro-Hillary?
Would we continue to denounce the other side with 100 percent conviction, or would the more rounded distribution of information plant a seed of doubt in our certitude? Shouldn’t we always be critical of our opinions and beliefs? Shouldn’t we strive to constantly challenge our “truths” by uncovering assumptions, and distinguishing between what we “know” from what we don’t know?
People are more complicated than mathematical models and algorithms. Facebook and Google need to deeply question their approaches to content curation.
