Shoot the Algorithm

A few days back, Michael Brown, an unarmed black man was shot dead by cops in a small town called Ferguson in the US. The incident sparked riots and protests to which the cops then responded with a shock and awe approach: they came out dressed like soldiers, sniper tripods and all! Unbelievable.

Zeynep Tufekci wrote an article on that from a different perspective:
“Ferguson is about many things, starting first with race and policing in America. But it’s also about internet, net neutrality and algorithmic filtering.”
Say what??? How did the Internet get dragged into this?

Tufekci said one of her friends wondered whether it would become national news. Another friend responded:
“Yes Ferguson will make news, another friend tweeted, because… well, here you go: Twitter.”
Of course, the friend was right. After all:
“Now, we expect documentation, live-feeds, streaming video, real time Tweets.”
Soon enough, Tufekci found her Twitter feed filled with Ferguson. But not on Facebook:
“And then I switched to non net-neutral Internet to see what was up. I mostly have a similar a composition of friends on Facebook as I do on Twitter.
Nada, zip, nada.
No Ferguson on Facebook last night. I scrolled. Refreshed.”
She blames Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm for that. Because once Ferguson was trending heavily on Twitter, it started showing up on Facebook as well. That led her to wonder:
“What if Ferguson had started to bubble, but there was no Twitter to catch on nationally? Would it ever make it through the algorithmic filtering on Facebook?...(or) Would Ferguson be buried in algorithmic censorship?”
And so she reminds us:
“Algorithms have consequences.”

But this is nothing new. Eli Pariser coined the term (and wrote a book) for this very phenomenon: “filter bubble”. I even wrote a blog on it last year! Here’s the Wikipedia definition of the term:
“A filter bubble is a result state in which a website algorithm selectively guesses what information a user would like to see based on information about the user (such as location, past click behaviour and search history) and, as a result, users become separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoints, effectively isolating them in their own cultural or ideological bubbles. Prime examples are Google's personalized search results and Facebook's personalized news stream.”
But I wonder how this bubble is any different from the one created by all newspapers, magazines and news channels? Except, of course, this one is created by that Great Evil called Technology. Maybe it’s just me, but if your only source of news is Facebook or Twitter (or social media in general), the problem is with you…but hey, let’s burn the technology witch anyway. Nicholas Carr famously asked:
“Is Google making us stupid?”
Tufekci and Alan Jacobs would have us add Facebook and Twitter to that question.

All this reminds me of the Facebook trial to add a “Satire” tag to articles that people link to. People on Slashdot seem to have my view on that idea. A few sample comments:
1)      “This is the new media. Clearly label satire; obfuscate native advertising.”
2)     “Can they add a "blatant politically motivated lie" tag while they're at it?”
3)     “And who determines if the content at that URL is satirical in nature?”

I so agree with this comment on Techdirt on all such criticism of algorithms:
“As a programmer, ranking algorithm are notoriously hard. There will always be bias and mistakes. There can't be a perfect algorithm.”
Just as editors of newspapers and magazines have their own bias and mistakes. But I am sure someone will come up with a reason as to why the slant of Old Media is not only different, but also better…

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more