Here is the news - but only if Facebook thinks you need to know | John Naughton | Opini... - 0 views
www.theguardian.com/...s-publishers-feeding-the-beast
media algorithm facebook social media news power influence
shared by Javier E on 16 May 16
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power essentially comes in three varieties: the ability to compel people to do what they don’t want to do; the capability to stop them doing what they want to do; and the power to shape the way they think
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This last is the kind of power exercised by our mass media. They can shape the public (and therefore the political) agenda by choosing the news that people read, hear or watch; and they can shape the ways in which that news is presented.
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For a long time, Google was the 800lb gorilla in this domain, because its dominance of search determined what people could find in the unimaginable wastelands of cyberspace
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search could be – and was – personalised, because Google’s algorithms could figure out what each user was most likely to be interested in, and therefore what kinds of information would be most relevant for her or him. So, imperceptibly, but inexorably over time, we have come to live in what Eli Pariser christened a “filter bubble”.
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Before the internet, our problem with information was its scarcity. Now our problem is unmanageable abundance. So now the scarce resources are attention and time, over which a vicious war has broken out between traditional media and the internet-based upstarts.
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YouTube has a billion users, half of whom access it via mobile devices. The average time spent on the site is 40 minutes. Facebook now claims to have 1.65 billion monthly active users, who spend on average 50 minutes a day on its services. So if Google is an 800lb gorilla, Facebook is a megaton King Kong.
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Competition for attention and time is a zero-sum game that traditional media are losing. In desperation, they are trying both to appease Facebook and to harness its hold on people’s attention
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In doing so, they have entered into a truly Faustian bargain. Because while publishers can without difficulty ship their stuff to Instant Articles, they cannot control which ones Facebook users actually get to see. This is because users’ news feeds are determined by Facebook’s machine-learning algorithms that try to guess what each user would like to see (and what might dispose them to click on an advertisement).
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when you ask – as Professor George Brock memorably did – whether Mark Zuckerberg and his satraps understand that they have acquired editorial responsibilities, they look blank. Facebook is not a publisher, they explain, merely a “platform”. And, besides, no humans are involved in curating users’ news feeds: it’s all done by algorithms and is therefore neutral. In other words: nothing to see here; move on.
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Any algorithm that has to make choices has criteria that are specified by its designers. And those criteria are expressions of human values. Engineers may think they are “neutral”, but long experience has shown us they are babes in the woods of politics, economics and ideology.