Why would you say that?



Could Facebook be putting words in your mouth?

One of the questions at the centre of this project is Do we need to change our attitudes to publishing online? The term ‘publishing’ tends to create thoughts of the gatekeepers of the printing press, with ability to transform you into the next JK Rowling. The reality is we all publish every single day, submitting an array of media from text and images to audio and video, in the form of tweets, posts and statuses. If you so much as post a comment on social media, you are publishing online.

Arguably the most prominent social media platform is Facebook. With over two billion active monthly users, it has rapidly transformed over the past decade or so from a directory of your friends, to a source of news, entertainment and much more. Its success is founded upon the idea that everything is better with friends, as well as several definitive innovations, most famously the News Feed.

Once upon a time, Facebook’s News Feed was simply a reverse chronological list of things our friends published online. However, with increased usage it soon became apparent that the amount of information in the feed could be so overwhelming, usage would likely dwindle.

Today, Facebook’s news feed is entirely algorithmic, showing users a synergy of advertising, content from friends and suggested content from other popular or sponsored sources. Facebook’s much guarded algorithms are estimated to be sixty million lines of code in length – no Facebook engineer, let alone you, could be reasonably expected to comprehend the News Feed’s opaque nature, let alone control what should be displayed.

But the algorithms can be nudged and steered. Franklin Foer in World Without Mind (2017) documents one of Facebook’s trials:

Facebook attempted to manipulate the mental state of its users. For one group, Facebook excised the positive words from the posts in the News Feed; for another group, it removed the negative words. Each group, it concluded, wrote posts that echoed the mood of the posts it had reworded. This study was roundly condemned as invasive, but it is not so unusual. As one member of Facebook’s data science team confessed: “Anyone on that team could run a test. They’re always trying to alter people’s behaviour.”

This is an important example of Facebook’s insidious power to alter our behaviour. Whether it is fellow publishers attempting to influence us at the ballot box or the platforms themselves managing our perception of our friendships, services like Facebook are far from benign, able to influence our thoughts and actions.

Even if the company behind the platform isn’t noticeably pulling the strings, consider how the language, emotions or information in content you see involuntarily in the News Feed may be affecting you. 

So do we need to change our attitudes to publishing online? I would argue a key consideration is whether that attitude is entirely our own or a caricature of ourselves, influenced by the tools we sleepwalked into trusting.

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