It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when we’ve lost control of what we see, read – and even think – about the biggest social media companies.
I fixed that around 2016. That was the year Twitter and Instagram joined Facebook and YouTube in the algorithmic future. They are run by robots programmed to keep our attention for as long as possible, and have promoted things that we would most likely type, share or heart – and bury all the others.
Goodbye, feed that showed everything and everyone we followed in an eternal, chronologically ordered river. Hello, high-energy feeds that appear with must-click.
Around the same time, Facebook, whose news feed has been driven by algorithms since 2009, hid the setting to switch back to ‘Most Recent’.
No matter, you probably thought if you think about it at all. Except that these opaque algorithms not only maximize the news of T. Swift’s latest album drops. They also maximized the reach of the arson – the attacks, the wrong information, the conspiracy theories. They pushed us further into our own hyperpolarized filter bubbles.