It dawned on me that I’d mostly stopped visiting websites directly and instead had been following the recommendations in my feeds to wherever they might lead me. My reading was no longer deliberate but curated by external forces that may or may not have aligned with my interests. I’d ceded control of my most valuable currency: my attention.
Of course, these are largely people and news organizations I’ve chosen to connect with. My Facebook friends are a mix of family, real-life friends, interest groups and professional acquaintances. On Twitter, it’s mostly journalists and sources I follow to keep up on my beats.
On Facebook, if you chose your friends wisely, you’d receive curated hyperlink recommendations that mostly aligned with your interests. Over time, the algorithm departed that. Twitter is also now taking this route and not showing you tweets in real-time in their apps or website but a curated view of what they think you’ll care about.
Why I prefer reading a blog’s RSS feed is I see everything, even things I don’t agree with. I can consume a more balanced news-feed. Facebook would only show me specific things they think I’d like. My friends may link to an african american’s perspective of oppression in big-cities but RSS subscriptions to a variety of news-outlets will give me that same event written from a gun-toting republican white man. Both people will have valid arguments and invalid ones but this gives me a balanced view from the outside. I think a lot of the anxiety around our political space in USA right now is based solely on people thinking things are one way because they’re only seeing news that supports their worldview.
Everyone I knew was amazed Donald Trump won the election. That’s the issue of only reading things Facebook’s AI shows you. You never read the perspective of a trump voter and you look a little stupid when you’re only in touch with 1 out of 2 people you meet on a daily basis. half of everyone you interacted with had a different political view than you but you never knew it because you trusted that Facebook would give you a balanced view. They’re in the business of keeping you clicking and that means showing you things that align with your assumptions.