Listening to our algorithms

I have a rather eclectic group of friends on Facebook. On any given day, I will see posts for Donald Trump, posts for Hilary Clinton, posts for Bernie Sanders, posts by Christians, posts by atheists, posts by conservatives, posts by liberals, even posts by a few bomb-throwing types (figuratively speaking).

I may be in the minority, and not for any reason of my own.

The algorithm made me do it.

When Gizmodo published a story claiming Facebook was biased against conservatives in how it managed Trending Topics, I thought, “And this is news?” As I read the story, though, it was more serious than I believed. Facebook could have almost singlehandedly turned Black Lives Matter into a major story when it wasn’t one to begin with.

The major newspapers and television networks know this. Facebook is the largest driver of online traffic to their news sites. And in the kind of crazy election year we’ve been experiencing, we really don’t know how much of what is happening is affected by algorithms used by Facebook and other social channels like Twitter, and how much is real.

At first glance, using an algorithm to determine what you do and don’t see in social media sounds technologically unbiased. Except for the fact that algorithms read what you read and like, and they serve you more of it, because that’s what keeps you clicking, that’s what keeps you on the site, and that’s what the social channels sell to advertisers.

So we all like cute puppy and kitten videos, and almost 140 million of us liked Candace Payne putting on a Chewbacca mask. Those are funny and fun, and we’ll keep seeing more of these show up because of that trusty algorithm.

But there’s a darker side. Do you know what kind of news and posts those algorithms really like?

Conspiracy theories.

 

Conspiracy theories abound, and thrive, on social channels. They virtually impossible to kill because they keep showing up, and they keep recycling, and if you keep seeing them (with links!) they must be true.

Vani Hari, aka the Food Babe, discovered this all on her own. She was trying to drawn attention to what she saw as the negative health effects of butter and margarine, and was getting nowhere.

Until she called it Monsanto butter. That tapped into a baker’s dozen of conspiracy theories on social media, and she went from largely ignored to food celebrity almost overnight. It doesn’t matter that nutritionists and scientists see her as misleading at best and downright dangerous at worst; she now has an audience and they will follow her over the cliff, disregarding anything contrary to their (and her) beliefs.

The problem is that we all do this. Given a choice to click on a link that supports what we already believe, and one that contradicts or disagrees with what we believe, guess which one we are more likely to choose?

And the algorithms are watching, and will serve up more of it.

Have you ever been surprised, after looking at a book on Amazon, to discover that same book showing up as a promoted post on your Facebook news feed?

You shouldn’t be. Yes, it’s that algorithm again, supplemented by a little friendly cooperation with advertisers.

It’s one thing if it’s a book. But it’s quite another when it’s an issue, a controversy, or a political belief system.

None of us are abandoning Facebook anytime soon. But we can be aware of what’s happening, seek out alternative viewpoints, and promise ourselves not to accept something as truth, even when “all of our Facebook friends” are saying so.

Related:

Worldviews, Villains, and Decisions

Wither the Media

Top photograph by Kevin Philips via Public Domain Pictures. Photograph of algorithm via Wikipedia. Both used with permission.

Wither the media

Whither - or wither - the news media? A tale of three anecdotes.

Earlier this week, Gizmodo published a story that said the people hired by Facebook to manage and curate “trending topics” often ignored what was really happening – mostly of a conservative bent – to promote stories they were more comfortable with – mostly of a liberal bent. CBS and The Washington Post covered the story, as did most of the mainstream and online media. It’s an important story because of the influence and impact Facebook has in promoting news.

According to Gizmodo, former employees said stories like the IRS / Lois Lerner scandal were played down, and stories like Black Lives Matter were played up. The former employees said that these Facebook editors, mostly journalists, often ignored Facebook’s own algorithms.

Facebook’s response was that there was no evidence this was true, and that Facebook’s system could not be played this way. It takes a few repeated readings to understand the responses, but what Facebook doesn’t deny is that it actually happened.

Second, we turn to Huff Post Green. A reporter interviewed the director of research for U.S. Right to Know, largely funded by the Organic Consumers Association. The director is a former Reuter’s reporter, Carey Gillam. They chat about all the things she learned about the agricultural industry, the 17 years she covered agriculture for Reuters, how companies would complain to her boss, and the work she’s doing for U.S. Right to Know.

Not once does the reporter ask her if she sees any conflict of interest in covering an industry like she did for 17 years and then going to work for U.S. Right to Know (had she gone to work for one of the big agricultural companies, people would have been outraged). The Huffington Post reporter had done only limited homework about Gillam’s years with Reuters. There’s no mention of how she managed to scoop story and after story that came from the activist community (activists knew a friendly voice when they found one); how she reported a pseudoscientific study as straight science, until she was called out by the Knight Center for the Study of Journalism at MIT; and how six weeks later did exactly the same thing with a pig study.

And third, there’s my own hometown newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It’s a liberal newspaper, with a liberal editorial stance, and that’s been generally consistent for the 37 years we’ve lived here. In the past few years, however, editorial comments and slants have been noticeably finding their way into the news stories and even how the news sections are edited (the sports page appears to be generally immune to this, most of the time).

Tony Messenger, formerly the head of the editorial page staff, is now a regular columnist. He reflects the newspaper’s editorial stance. From occasional comments in his column, he must receive a fair amount of flak from readers. But a column is opinion, and he writes his opinions.

In a recent article, he noted what different readers had said about his columns on the municipal courts in St. Louis County, a subject that received extraordinary coverage after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson. The subject should have received this coverage – the way the municipalities, courts, judges, and attorneys managed their business – and particularly how they wrote traffic tickets, often to the disadvantage of the poor (and black) citizens – should have been brought to light. The problem has existed for years, and should have been reported long before the Michael Brown shooting.

What Messenger did in his column, though, was something I didn’t expect. He essentially dismissed the critics of his column and the paper by saying they followed and listened to only “their own narrative.”

I had to read that a few times to make sure I was actually reading what he said. People who disagreed with his and the paper’s stories were following only their own narrative? What?

Does he think the media don’t follow their own narratives? Does he think the Post-Dispatch editorial page doesn’t follow its own narrative? Has he never googled “media narrative” to find 134,000,000 search results?

Does he not realize that he writes with his own rather blatant narrative?

Facebook is the single greatest transmitter of clicks to the major news media; that’s why it’s “trending stories” is so important.

Reporters can be just as influenced by lobbying organizations claiming to watch out for the public interest as they can be by big business, big labor, and big government.

And columnists write within the framework of their own narrative and the larger narrative of the news medium they work for. And they shouldn’t dismiss criticism as “readers’ narratives.”

These stories are examples of a larger media problem – why there is an issue of trust and mistrust with the media. We can no longer trust what we read in online or traditional media as news when so much evidence points toward narratives and agendas.

Top and middle photographs by Kai Stochiwiak, and bottom photograph by Ron Mzr, all via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Everyone is young, once

I don’t spend a lot of time on Facebook, most likely because I have to manage a corporate Facebook page as part of my job (along with other social media). I do like seeing what friends are up to, and I “like” several pages related to writing and poetry and check those on a regular basis.

Everyone has a “reconnect” Facebook story. Last year I had a surprise friend request from my best friend in junior high – someone I hadn’t seen since high school. We actually were able to talk on the telephone, and it was great fun to remember life at 12 and 13 years old (and he remembered things I had long ago forgotten about, like riding the bus into downtown New Orleans for a movie, and where we went biking).

This past week, a friend request arrived, and I looked at the name and said “It couldn’t be.” But it was. The guy who was a copy boy at the Beaumont, Texas, Enterprise in 1973 had sent the request.

Something like this happens, and you move back 40 years in time. It was the summer of 1973, and my first job out of college. I was all of 21, engaged to be married, and working as a brand new copy editor. The copy boy, John Sniffen by name, took photographs; I believe he was taking a photojournalism course at the local university.

And there we are, again, a group of editors, mostly young, working on the publication of three editions of a newspaper in a small town in Texas. I remember the names of my colleagues. This photo would most likely have been taken in June because of where I’m sitting – the spot designated for whomever was the new kid on the block. Because staff turnover tended to be high, with three months I would occasionally sit in the position at the far left – assistant slot man. Three months was all it took to go from newbie to No. 2 on the copy desk.

It was an exciting time to be in journalism – the Watergate scandal was unfolding; Vice President Agnew would resign that fall; and the Yom Kippur War broke out in October, ushering in the first oil embargo the United States had experienced. The world changed forever in those few months.

After we were married that August, my wife also worked here as a copy editor.

Another interesting (for me) part of this is that we reconnected because we have a mutual friend. John is a member of the same church as Marcus Goodyear, editor of The High Calling.

A Facebook friend request, a photograph – and suddenly you’re reminded that you were young, once.

Everyone is young, once.

Photograph by John Sniffen, summer 1973, Beaumont, Texas, Enterprise copy desk.

It's All Changing

I’m working on a presentation about social media (my full-time job) (except for the other stuff that’s not social media), and I deliberately carved out some time to think about the impact it’s having on the work that I’ve been associated with for more than 35 years.

You have to carve out the time – block out the calendar and close the office door, or find a space if you occupy a cubicle – to think. Social media has a tendency to make you do that – forcibly block out the time to think, that is.

The first indication I had of the personally transformative impact of social media happened three years. I was giving a speech in New York – and the editor of a trade publication was livetweeting my speech. The people back at the office – and those in the room with access – were following what I said and how I answered questions. Fortunately, everything went well.

That doesn’t happen all the time when a speech is livetweeted. There are plenty of stories of what happened when an executive’s speech was livetweeted – and people in the audience started following the tweets – and people inside and outside the room started fact-checking – and all of it was being tweeted and retweeted. The people in the room began to talk among themselves, and the speech (and the speaker) ended up trashed.

This is the world of social media. Remember Toyota’s problem with reports of brakes failing? It started as a single tweet on Twitter. It ended months later in a government exoneration – but Toyota went through a smashed quality reputation for a considerable period of time.

At work we’ve learned that Twitter and Facebook function like headline news alerts. We see information faster on Twitter than you can get via Google news alerts. Beyond just alerts, social media collectively is replacing traditional journalism as news sources. A business journalist writing for CNBC recently pointed out that his main sources of information have dramatically shifted – today, he relies upon StockTwits.

First lesson: With social media and the ease of using the various channels, everyone has become a journalist. Traditional journalism has been in decline for years. It’s not dead, and it won’t die anytime soon, but its power and influence are much reduced from 30 and 40 years ago.

Related to that is the second lesson: Expertise counts for less than it once did; influence is what matters now. If people trust you as a source, they will believe most if not all of what you say and likely retweet it on Twitter and share it or like it on Facebook. And who needs experts anyway if you can find everything you need online?

This is especially frustrating for people with expertise. People with PhDs in one of the sciences, say biochemistry, are shocked to learn that what they say will usually count less than an actress or a popular book author. Our culture’s fixation with celebrity has contributed to this. The inability of a lot of experts to speak in understandable language is also a factor. Plus experts are usually (and rightfully) cautious; they know what all the studies and tests and evidence say and how far they can go with that; people on social media have no compunction about proclaiming something – no matter how ridiculous – as true.

These changes suggest a third lesson – social media inevitably cause conflict within an organization. Employees have access to more information than ever, including bad news. Traditional communication departments struggle to deal with what looks like the Wild West, a free-for-all and total chaos. Many executives deliberately choose not to involve themselves in Twitter and Facebook, and so don’t understand what it’s about, how to deal with it, and how to resource it.

A fourth lesson: you can’t not participate, even if it’s only to watch and monitor, learn and understand. Many public relations people will tell you that you can’t properly do any communications job today without being at least involved in and have an understanding of social media. And no matter what kind of work we do, if we’re working for an organization, we’re communicators, no matter what the work at hand is.

And someone out there is tweeting the kind of work you do, posting it on Facebook, creating a short video for YouTube, blogging about it, adding photos to Pinterest and Flickr, creating a new App for your phone and a new iBook for your iPad. (If you want a good example of how an entire industry can be transformed in a fairly short period of time, look at the publishing industry.)

It’s all changing. Yes, it’s wild. But participation is no longer an option.