I've been reading the book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier. In it he made a chilling observation; how the consumption of news is no longer a shared experience. In the pre-social media times folks would get their news from television, radio or newspapers. Everybody got the same message.
Picture this, we are in a large room with dozens of people, or a football game, it doesn't matter, if everybody was looking at their phones at the same time, all looking at the news feed on Facebook, not one feed would be the same! The algorithms choose what is presented to each individual, tailored to their browning history.
You can see how this could cause confusion among folks, because nobody is getting the same story. Social media, being what it is, is not not held to the same standards as traditional journalism and therefore has the ability to muddy the waters of trust.
The trouble with algorithms is that they are not working for US, they are working for the social media companies. They are designed to keep us "engaged" and to stay on their platforms for as long as possible. These algorithms don't care HOW they keep us scrolling and they all eventually learn that negative stories are more powerful "engagement" tools than positive ones.
By law, traditional broadcast media must present fact-checked and balanced stories. Do they sometimes get it wrong? Absolutely! They are run by humans after all. But humans are guided by a moral imperative (some more than others to be sure) and we have structures of checks and balances to keep people who are reporting and broadcasting the news accountable. The black boxes that feed us the news on social media platforms have no such morals and have a different goal than the reporting of the best version of the truth available at the time.
Lanier is a compelling writer and has a sense of humor about the predicament we find ourselves in today.
Recommended. It'll make you think about what you're doing with your phone.
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