Their vaunted algorithms?
It’s all horsecrap.
Period.
Over the years, we have all heard about Facebook’s Graph, or Google’s PageRank, or Twitter’s timeline algorithms.
Crap.
Nothing at all.
Completely useless.
What these social media platforms have are threefold.
Firstly, they possess the resources to purchase oodles of information on their users - outside their services! – and meld that with user activities inside their walled gardens, to produce a facsimile of smartness into the targeted ads they sell to their advertisers.
Secondly, they have the power to manipulate users by tweaking their timelines in order to create artificial pockets of “community” whereby even the slightest affinity, real or perceived, buttonholes the user into a pool where the noise is amplified.
Thirdly, they game their ad systems by presenting ads based on points #1 and #2 above, creating the semblance of great knowledge as a result of some super-smart algorithmic sorting.
Bullshit!
What they have done, is segment us for their ad dollars, and create these pools of political or social “oneness” whereby even the smallest thing that ‘unites’ them is force-multiplied by the network effects of said seeming oneness until it drowns out any reason.
Creating pockets of online “Fox Newers”, if you will.
Making matters worse, the tonedeaf creeps running these crapshows – Zuckerberg, Sandberg, Dorsey, et al, – are blind to the genocides their ‘babies’ are spawning in quite a few places, for which Rohingya comes to mind.
What these sanctimonious mofos have shown, is that they are completely amoral, and cannot be trusted.
So, they need to be reined in.
For the good of democracies everywhere, they need to be reined in.
For the lived that would be put in danger if they aren’t, they need to be reined in.
For their own good, they need to be reined in.
I believe that a good start would be forcing them to present an unaltered chronological/reverse-chronological/whatever timeline to users as the default. Users would have the option to add their stupid algorithmic feeds if that’s what a user wants, but at the same time making sure that the user reserves the right, and the option to revert to a so-called ‘naked’ feed.
Let them now present ads based on that. Let them do the heavy lift required to entice users with ads. Not manipulating users to fit the ads. Or the ad campaign.
Me, I am looking to wean myself off the most despicable of these services, Facebook.
I have 32 days to go.
© 2002 – 2019, John Obeto for Blackground Media Unlimited
Follow @johnobeto