The Problem with Social Media News Feeds
Why editors are probably better than algorithms
There is something unsettling about how social media feeds show us the news. Many people sense it but can’t always put their finger on what it is exactly — that feeling of something is strange here when one sees a funny video clip above a story about a school shooting.
Since the flow of posts and stories we see is democratic and crowdsourced, yet governed by algorithms which patch together recent news, chosen by our friends or those we follow, there is no overarching cohesion to what we see — no flow or significance in the structure of the news we see.
Contrast this to the pre-Internet days and even pre-TV days when the very structure of a newspaper or radio broadcast carried information. The first story or the front page headline carried significance and simply because it was the first. Front page news didn’t present recent issues, it also social weight. People knew what to expect, and in a lot of ways it was a very centralized, elite, and patriarchal system.
Editors and radio producers — an educated, well-connected bunch — chose what the important news of the day was. In these times, small groups of people signaled to society that an issue discussed on page 11 or at the end of a broadcast was less essential issues at the front and center.
But at least there was some intent and purpose surrounding these editorial and production choices. When algorithms personalize content for humans to interact with, the intent is completely different from when editors put together tomorrow’s newspaper.
Rather than signaling to society with a gatekeeper’s sense of duty and responsibility that some issue or incident carries weight, algorithms are designed to keep our attention for as long as possible. These algorithms have no sense of moral duty, and the social media companies who create them derive their revenue from attention, not social benefit.
It reminds me of this quote by Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek Finance Minister ,quoted in an article on a different topic, on cryptocurrency:
“We can not subcontract the discussions about what is proper, what is just, what is fair, what is right, to some algorithm, to any algorithm — even to the most fascinatingly brilliant algorithm” — Yanis Varoufakis
In the highly capitalistic world we live in, almost every activity in our lives have already been monetized. This is true of where we put our attention and how we get our news. I prefer to have accountable humans choosing content rather than social media companies that try their darnedest not to be responsible for content screw-ups, so I do a small thing and subscribe to magazines like The Atlantic and National Geographic to give them an incentive to keep publishing the way they have been.
There are other media companies trying their best to combat this trend, and to monetize quality content. Medium itself, where you’re reading this, is making a solid effort to do this.
But judging by how profitable the social media and clickbait websites have been, I’m not confident that conscious human choice will beat algorithms when it comes to proliferating quality content.
