Facebook News Feeds: A Form of Personalized Information
Facebook these days is an interesting combination of social and personal sharing, sponsored links, and other forms of general news. According to this article, “about 30 percent of adults in the United States get their news on Facebook”. However, everyone receives different, personally recommended articles. To me, this screams a variation of advertising based on search behavior. Instead of only tracking searches, the Facebook algorithm must track what uses click on, what their friends view and share, and many other factors in order to recommend the “correct” articles and links to each user.
The article mentions Greg Marra, an engineer at Facebook who works on the code for Facebook’s News Feed – and how he is “fast becoming one of the most influential people in the news business”. At first, I was skeptical, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized the truth of that statement. People only know what they see, and if he controls what people see, he controls what people know. Unlike personalized advertisements, these personalize news article recommendations really affect the information and current trends that people are exposed to. I would be very interested to see how the Facebook News Feed algorithms take into account clickthrough rates of links and valuations of certain types of information to users and their friends. According to the article, the code for each person’s News Feed “is based on ‘thousands and thousands’ of metrics, Marra said, including what device a user is on, how many comments or likes a story has received and how long readers spend on an article.” And the “sponsored links” on Facebook are a whole different topic; those algorithms must also take into account the revenue that the posts make, and which users to show them to for maximized profit.
Overall, Facebook is a constantly evolving place where people get information. The scary thought: we could be manipulated by the display algorithms and never know. People on the inside could accept bribes, under the table or even out in the open, to display certain content higher and more often. The people working on the algorithms could even adjust everyone’s based on their own personal preferences (for example, showing more liberal articles, or more cat videos). No matter what, we are defined by what we are exposed to, and Facebook decides that for us.