The Facebook whistleblower's revelations shouldn't surprise any of us. It's obvious Facebook has continuously engineered and re-engineered the Facebook experience. For none of the reasons the whistleblower felt it necessary to speak out, I was disappointed in how those changes impacted my interactions with friends. Before I delve into that, let me describe, in the simplest terms I can, what Facebook did.
Back in the earlier days of Facebook, our timeline, or 'feed', would present the posts made by all our friends in chronological order. Then for a long time they started showing us 'top stories'; I think that's the way they said it. But with determination and effort, we could still select 'most recent' as our preference for our timelines. I remember again and again having to go back, frustrated about it as hell, and re-select 'most recent'. Facebook's definition of tops stories is probably less what that says it is and more like 'most likely to get users to click on it'. Eventually, if I am not mistaken, the option to see 'most recent' was eliminated altogether.
Something else that happened during this slow transition, and this goes back a number of years, is that the algorithm was also changed to diminish how often we see posts from friends with whom we don't often interact. So if I have an old friend, a school chum, perhaps, and we don't talk or at least rarely talk, the program reduces visibility to each of us of the other's content. This always bothered me. I can still see their content if I go specifically to their timeline, but with 500 or 700+ friends, that became rarer and rarer. So I lost touch with many people who I came to Facebook specifically to stay in touch with.
Facebook didn't do ANY of the above to improve our experience. They did it to increase the number of mouse clicks we make each time we're on. Money for them. They study our behavior, individually and collectively, and continuously tweak the algorithm to put likely mouse clicks into our feed and to remove less likely mouse clicks. So screw my old school chum and the fact that Facebook allowed us to connect and to stay in touch. That may be what I want, but it's not what Facebook finds to be in their own financial best interests.
The content we have shown Facebook to be profitable is the stuff that gets us mad. Political stuff. Social stuff. Controversial stuff. We click on it. You and me. As we do, our timeline adjusts itself away from other content and toward the controversial stuff slowly but surely. And thus we enter into the echo chambers of our own political thought. And sadly, and scary, too, is that this echo chamber is far less affirmation of the good things the politicians and personalities we support are saying and doing, but more often it's the stuff that angers us that those with whom we disagree are saying. And a lot of that kind of content is very caustic, hateful, and spiteful. We become inculcated with animosity to the other side, a natural reaction to being immersed in things that inspire our anger. The Facebook echo chamber specifically engenders division.
As a result of this, I know I am personally guilty of muting people, friends of mine, who are deep within their echo chamber, find these caustic and confrontational positions normalized, and then push them out. I can think of one dear friend from work, and African-American woman, whose posts I took as in essence calling me a racist again and again and again. Regretfully, I defriended her. But it seemed pointless to try and convince her I'm not a racist simply because I disagree with her on US immigration policy. Another friend of mine, this time from my football tailgate group, repeatedly posted articles by Dan Rather and the like that called Trump supporters, which I take to include myself, as stupid. I took it to mean she thinks I'm stupid for supporting Trump. How else was I supposed to interpret that? I muted her. I miss the interactions, but I'm not fucking stupid. I just disagree with you. Joe Biden if the fucking stupid one. There was a guy I know from when I was working. During the 2016 election, he posted that he was "ready to go to jail" over the election. I muted him, too.
Before I tell you why I think all three of the aforementioned friends were so comfortable insulting me, I want to make this perfectly clear: this is not exclusively a problem from the left. The one on the right is just as problematic an echo chamber as is the one on the left. I cringe at some of the garbage that's been normalized that comes from both sides.
That fact we're deep in these click driven echo chambers doesn't make us right about anything, but it sure makes us think we're right. I know speaking for myself, and this is probably true for most of you who are taking the time to read this, I like reading articles that are aligned with my own views and opinions. It's reinforcing. The echo chamber that our clicks, mutes, defriends, unfollows, etc., create is that, but times 1000.
This brings me to the concepts of 'fact checkers' and 'disinformation'. It's all well and good for Facebook to say they're going to ramp up fact checking efforts to reduce disinformation, but I know damned well that whoever they designate the arbiter of truth and accuracy will be someone deep in the left's echo chamber, and as a result their thinking will be highly propagandized, leftist, elitist, and anti-right in almost every way. It's further down a slippery slope, not a fix to the problem.
This mouse click and greed driven echo chamber has been bad for social and political discourse. It has divided families. It has ended friendships. It has created far more problems between people than we even realize.
If Facebook offered two options: 1) See content from ALL of my friends, and 2) See most recent content, rather than tailoring my experience and pushing me into my right wing echo chamber, I'd take it on a heartbeat. Whether you're on the right, or from the left, wouldn't you? Oh, and for the record, I don't trust Facebook to fix this problem. There's more money in divisiveness for them than in letting friends stay in touch, and besides, the arbiters of accuracy and truth they'll employ to do it are ALL going to be from deep within their echo chamber, anyway. It's damned if they do and damned if they don't. Because my two options, 'all friends' and 'most recent' are not going to be anywhere near any option that Facebook will actually consider.
