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Living With the Facebook Mom Effect

Source: http://boffosocko.com/2017/07/11/the-facebook-algorithm-mom-problem/

Chris Aldrich ran into an interesting issue trying to promote his blog posts on Facebook. For some reason, his posts were only reaching a very small audience, despite the fact that he was putting out quality technical content that should have, at least in theory, attracted a much larger audience. The only attention he was getting seemed to be from his family. The most immediate explanation that comes to mind is that his content was not that good, and his family was just being supportive. However, more is going on underneath the scenes. In his blog post, Aldrich reveals what he calls “The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem.” He noticed that almost immediately after he posted a new article, his mom would like it. He then hypothesizes that Facebook would interpret this to mean that the content he posted was relevant to his family and other people who are friends with and regularly interact with him and his mom. He then notes that his sister wasn’t far behind his mom when liking the posts. This means that Facebook would further target the exposure of his post to his family members and limit how much it would show up for the general public. His posts tended to die there, because their technical nature did not attract a large audience among his family members. He provides statistical thermodynamics as an example of his post topics.

Aldrich’s problem would not be interesting if he did not find a working solution, but he did. When he posts one of his technical articles, he makes them visible to a group of his friends that specifically excludes his mom. This prevents her from liking it, and Facebook no longer interprets his posts as being relevant to his family. After he gets an audience on his post, he changes the visibility settings to allow his mom to like it. By this time, Facebook’s algorithm has enough other data so that it does not view his posts as family related. This directly relates to this class and my life. Facebook’s algorithm looks at connections between who likes certain posts to prioritize other people’s news feeds. Because his mom would like the post, it would assume the post was relevant to connections that he had in common with his mom. It suggested the post to those people as a way to solve something similar to the triadic closure we have discussed in class. When Facebook sees connected people liking something, and they have a mutual connection that did not like it, it is like an incomplete triangle in one of the graphs that we have been studying. Facebook attempts to close the triangle by showing more people the post. Although I did not understand it at the time, I believe I might have run into a similar problem when I was trying to post my web design portfolio on Facebook while I was in high school. Graph theory directly effects the world around us, and knowledge of it can be very useful.

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