It’s not the ads, it’s the algorithms
During Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before Congress last week, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked whether she would be able to create targeted ads stating that Republicans support the Green New Deal. Stuttering, Zuckerberg responded with a loose “probably,” before launching into an awkward polemic about how lying is bad and how citizens deserve to see the lies politicians tell them.
Since then, the Facebook controversy has dovetailed into an absurd argument over free-speech, as if social networks were public utilities, not for-profit entities. But that hasn’t stopped other tech monopolies from joining in on the conversation. On Wednesday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced that his platform would ban political advertising altogether. In a Twitter thread, Dorsey reprimanded targeted political ads, stating that the attention given to political messages should be earned instead. But what does it mean to earn attention on social networks?
On Twitter and Facebook, both organic and paid posts are micro-targeted to users based on what the network believes they will engage with the most. For example, if you comment on a tweet from Trump, Twitter will likely show you more of his posts, even if you don’t follow him. But this system wasn’t created to bring value to users. It was designed to boost engagement, extract data, and sell ads. When personalized algorithms dictate the information we see on our feeds, it’s the loudest, and most controversial content that “earns” our attention.
The problem isn’t just advertising, it’s the attention economy. When platforms like Twitter and Facebook use engagement-based algorithms, there’s no such thing as “free and fair” civil discourse on their networks — even without targeted political ads.
In an era where we so often feel powerless against the tech giants that control our data and monopolize our attention, Dorsey’s decision to ban political ads feels like a step in the right direction. But at Relevant, we believe that without a total restructuring of current social networks, we will continue to be oppressed by the perverse personalized algorithms that dictate the flow of information online.
So what can we do about it? We believe that personalization is inherently detrimental to public discourse. That’s why Relevant doesn’t have personalized feeds. Every user sees the exact same information in the exact same order. This allows us to put curation power into the hands of community members instead of machine learning algorithms.
The result is a network of topic-specific feeds where users can decide what kind of information is relevant to their community. It’s the same reason that Wikipedia works. It’s designed so that users with opposing viewpoints can come to a consensus about what constitutes valuable information, not to pander to individual worldviews.
We’re not suggesting that social networks be responsible for democratic decision-making, but in an increasingly online world, we should have the right to healthy and equitable networks that put the interests of users first, not shareholders.
