Do you get your news from truly unbiased sources? In my four years as a University of Michigan student, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard “I get my news from the Times or NPR, at least it's not Fox News”. But have you ever actually looked into your own filter bubble, and the kinds of news-related posts your friends share on Facebook?Facebook really gets a bad rep these days. There’s the news that it won’t fact check politicians or paid advertisers, including political advertising, and remove those that are fake. Their algorithms give this argument merit by predicting which stories it thinks you’ll click on and putting them at the top of your feed, making it more visible to you.
As exemplified in Saslow’s “‘Nothing on this page is real’: How lies become truth in online America”, the more politically extreme a post is, the more comments and likes it gets, and the more it is seen by others. The result of this is that political extremes are more likely to show up on your own feed — true or false. Not only is this because of a technical bias stemming from an algorithm that only shows you what it thinks you want to see, but also from an emergent bias based on what people choose to share to their newsfeed (Brey 2010). Essentially, the algorithm coders at Facebook (who are human, too) are just doing what they think will make you enjoy and use the platform more.
So what can you do to outsmart Facebook’s biased algorithm? The first step is to become more aware of what your own newsfeed looks like. One app that I have used before, PolitEcho, will analyze your newsfeed and tell you which of your friends lean which way based on their “Likes”, as well as just how influential they are to your own newsfeed. It will describe the composition of your newsfeed and how much it leans one way. This knowledge will empower you to be able to make choices about your own filter bubble, and it is up to us to become more aware of our own filter bubbles and counteract them, because Facebook isn’t going to change their algorithms any time soon.
I really like that you included an app at the end of the post to call people to action - you have convinced me to try using it too. Moreover, I think you did a good job with adding an anecdote at the very beginning as it connects with the readers right away. The visuals and hyperlinks also made the post very engaging and interactive to read. One suggestion would be to expand on the readings a bit more - you mentioned emergent bias but didn't explain what that meant. Overall, your post was super relevant and easy to understand. I really enjoyed reading it.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoy the hook to your blog, it does a great job at tying the reader in. I really enjoy the second picture you use but I think the blog would benefit if you used another picture for the first picture. Maybe it could be replaced with a statistic on how much fake news is released every day overall. I also enjoyed how you tied the reading into your blog but I think it would help if you talked more about the reading overall. In total I really enjoyed your blog.
ReplyDeleteI think this is a very interesting and pertinent topic, especially with this being an election year. I can not tell you how many elderly friends and family members I have on facebook sharing blatant disinformation from both sides of the political spectrum from "extremist" pages they follow. You allude to it, but I think discussing how these algorithms can cause people to shift to political extremes themselves, and the damage it is doing could be useful. You also don't really talk about whether facebook is actually in the wrong or not, but again I think you allude to it. Making these things clearer could really strengthen the piece. You tied in the Saslow piece nicely, but didn't discuss the positive feedback loop these "memes" create, which i think would be good to add here because it emphasizes the fact that people are ingrained on their sides of the political spectrum.
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