Some Social media experts say that currently social media algorithms are shaping human life next to nature and nurture. The influence of social media on our daily lives is becoming much more than expected. The first thing we do when we wake up in the morning is to pick up our phone and scroll on social media platforms. Most of us have no idea how this social media algorithm works; but the information coming from the phone reaches us and; we are not much aware about the impact.
The front page of social media feeds- news, photos and videos – have a huge impact on our world. The information we receive on social media is processed by algorithms designed for this purpose. The amount of information that is posted per minute is beyond human capacity, so the algorithm automatically processes what content is coming to our social media front page.
Social media sites are devices increasingly present in our everyday lives; and platforms that encode certain social relationships plus gather personalized data from their users’ interactions. And social media sells the audience commodity in a more efficient way. The target is individuals and their desire not demographic groups, as mass media does.
News delivery through social media platforms differs from traditional news distribution in important ways. The use of algorithms enables online platforms to serve tailored content to users. They can also be used to exclude information and opinions that they may have an interest in not circulating for example if such information does not please advertisers or is not engaging for users. Algorithms can also be used to give some content preeminence over others either by deciding at what time they should appear on a feed or in what order.
Information about users allows social media platforms to identify audiences which may be interested in this or that type of content. Figuring out users’ interest allows platforms to serve them content that can keep them engaged at all times. While it is often the case that users’ newsfeeds in a platform like Facebook contain very little substantive news intermingled with a lot of other personalized information: comment, gossip, personal observations, commercial messages and so on, there is data that shows that users seem to respond to the availability of actual news through social media favorably and at least in part use their social media platforms to seek and consume the news.
However, this means that they may only be committed to distributing news content as long as there is revenue to be
obtained from it and this may also mean that they are not necessarily committed to distributing quality news content; to the extent that the content can lead them to make a profit.
According to studies, across social media sites, there is an increasing number of users that use social media platforms as sources for news. For instance, 67 percent of US adults reported getting at least some of their news on social media. 32 and 29 percent of YouTube and Snapchat users respectively get news from those sites, and a majority of Twitter (74 percent) and Facebook users (68 percent) do so on those other ones.
As to the report launched by the US Census Bureau in 2016, The United States has a total population of around 323 million people, and overall, since 66 percent of Americans use Facebook, this means that 45 percent of the whole country’s population considers this particular social network as a source of news, and about 26 percent of them use more than one social network for this same purpose.
When users see content available to them at any given point in time, what the company calls the News Feed, they are not seeing content merely presented in chronological order. The content they see is determined by a series of automated processes, the algorithms that decide what the user will see at any given moment. This is decided, at least in part through the collection and analysis of data that aims to determine what the preferences and interests of any given user are. The order in which users see content depends on various factors including how often they visit Facebook, how often they interact with their friends and other companies present on the platform and how often and to what degree they interact with content that has appeared on their feed in the past.
The study further noted that the algorithms make decisions based on profiles created by matching registration and location details, with viewing and sharing data as well as metadata such as content keywords. Those algorithms determine, for example, what posts from friends a user will see and also what news content from media companies will appear at what moment and when they will appear in the feed; based on the profile the social network has created on any given user. Their algorithms curate everyday online content through information prioritization, classification, associating and filtering usually without users being aware of their existence and use.
Likewise, Facebook News Feed is programmed to be viral, clicky, upbeat or quarrelsome. That is how its algorithm works and how it determines what more than a billion people see every day. Facebook wants to choose the best content out of several thousand potential stories that could appear in your News Feed each day and put those in the first few dozen slots that you will actually browse through. Facebook algorithms decide what may be of interest for a particular user, at what point in time they should see this or that content, in which order the content should appear.
Ultimately, the objective of Facebook´s algorithms is selecting the most relevant and engaging stories and showing them in the News Feed in order to keep users engaged with their platform the longest amount of time possible. This means Facebook decides what is given the most prominence on its News Feed, what content gets relegated and given less visibility or what content is taken down from the platform. Algorithms exert various types of control over content as they have a key role in selecting what information is considered more relevant to us, a crucial characteristic of our participation in public life.
When Facebook decided to leave all news content distribution decisions in the hands of algorithms, the results were not quite what the company expected, automated decisions even helped spread disinformation, not to curtail it, added the study mentioning that Google itself has had the same experience. The algorithms used by YouTube to suggest videos to users tend to recommend disinformation or disturbing and violent content. By error or by design, they seem to privilege certain pieces of information over others, often with undesirable consequences. “In fact automated processes are just as fallible as the humans that create them,” the study further elaborated citing studies conducted by different scholars in earlier times.
Furthermore, Algorithms can be manipulated whether by the social platforms themselves or by third parties and we cannot expect that they will always make correct decisions regarding news content, a task that on its own is difficult for seasoned human journalists themselves. There is also the very important issue of transparency.
According to a research conducted by Figueiredo, Carlos, and César Bolaño some years back under the title “Social Media and Algorithms: Configurations of the Life world Colonization by New Media, algorithms command interactivity between humans and software and software and computers mediate human interactions in social media. For social media algorithms data extracted from the tracking of user interactions with other users’ profiles and companies’ profiles would be the input while the ads and contents recommended for this user would be the output.
As to the researchers, that output is the result of statistical calculations made from large volumes of data compiled with help from high processing power computers. The presence of algorithms in everyday life takes on a pervasive form. They act on financial markets on Netflix movie recommendations on Google search results and on social media sites
Algorithms were designed to solve problems but they are inert and work only with data. Algorithms need a sheer amount of data resulting from tracking user interactions to deliver personalized content and advertising. That huge amount of data is compiled in real time by social media algorithms thanks to computers with high processing power. A large mass of data whose compilation is only possible with the help of powerful computers is conventionally called Big Data.
Social media algorithms actually predict something for each person and it is not a force of expression, or metaphor but it is a power of right prediction and distribution of content or ads for the right person with a margin of error much smaller than that observed in traditional Cultural Industry.
BY MAHLET GASHAW
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD THURSDAY 7 MARCH 2024
