Has ____ seen your story yet?
Usually within a few seconds and a few obnoxious keyboard clicks, I’m able to figure it out. If it’s someone I have a close relationship with, I won’t even have to scroll to reach their name. The convenient part of it all is that the activity I’m seeing is all based off of people I interact with, whether through DMs, or profiles I frequent, which are typically those of my closest friends and even a few boys that I cycle through talking to. I don’t have to go very far to see what ____ ate for dinner or what ____ wore to that wedding yesterday. This, my friends, is called the social media algorithm. Existing on all mass social networking sites, the social media algorithm is defined as the mathematical calculation that these sites [Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, etc] use to understand user habits and to customize the social experience. So what do you think, cool, or creepy?
How it [the algorithm] works
For years, the social media algorithm was pretty straightforward. The posts would go in chronological order based on how recently they were posted. Now, algorithms sort social media posts based on relevancy, rather than publish time. They work to prioritize the content in a users’ feed by the likelihood of them wanting to see it. This is a marketing scheme that most people will never fully understand… I mean, how does my phone know that I was talking to my friend about getting Chick-Fil-A for lunch? Why is that one ex-girlfriend of his at the top of my follower list? For someone with anxiety, you can bet it puzzles me when I see the algorithm being rearranged. If the same 10 people who usually show up at the top of my feed suddenly stop showing up in that same exact order, I begin to question things.
Don’t understand yet? Here’s another example. I watched American Murder: The Family Next Door the other day, and somehow ended up on the “Chris Watts” side of Tiktok, where TikTokers are discussing theories behind the murders. The weird part? I watched the movie on my laptop and I watch TikToks on my iPhone, not to mention, I don’t even have the Netflix app on my phone! At this point, I’m sure my phone is listening to me, and no, I’m not the only one. There are hundreds of conspiracy theories about how your phone uses AI, otherwise known as Artificial Intelligence, to target consumers. Don’t believe me yet? Try it yourself. Talk about something and watch it appear as an ad as you’re scrolling through Facebook or Twitter later tonight. This just goes to show the algorithm is, in fact, a real thing and these social media sites know exactly what they need to do to target consumers.
Observations of my own — Instagram
Before writing this article I wanted to be sure I’d understood the way of the Instagram algorithm. Instagram is quite possibly one of the most used social media sites by our generation worldwide and it was up to me to get to the bottom of this weird algorithm. Upon reading Instagram’s privacy policy, I noticed that they collect a lot of specific information, from networks and connections to the things that others do and information they provide about you. This is scary, but it makes sense. If I’m constantly interacting with a few people on Instagram, it would make sense to see them at the top of my story list, right? It doesn’t end there; when you click on the FOLLOWING and FOLLOWERS buttons on your Instagram account, instead of randomizing the followers, Instagram began by listing followers out in chronological order. For most of us, the algorithm has since then adjusted to listing those people you interact with most at the top of your list accordingly. When you’re scrolling through your feed, you’ll notice that most photos will have a name of a mutual follower along with the words “and others have liked this picture.” The “and others” is key. The algorithm knows you’ll really only care about the first name listed before your eyes. Perhaps it’s the name of someone’s profile you frequent a lot, or it’s as simple as your best friend’s IG handle. Finally, when you post an Instagram story, the stories begin by randomizing themselves up until the first 49 viewers. Once your story hits 50, usernames will show up chronologically, by the people who’s stories you’d be more likely to want to watch, or the people who choose to interact with you the most. This happens every time without fail, unless someone has you muted… But that’s another topic of conversation. Either way, Instagram knows you better than you think.
How we lost social media through the algorithms
Just like Instagram, all other platforms have similar features. A toggle to show the best tweets first and a Facebook story system that works the same way and Youtube with a specific subscription basis–now, with the help of the new iOS14 update, iphone users can pin iMessage conversations, something you could already do on Snapchat. That being said, social media has completely changed. At first, it was a well-rounded platform many could use to communicate and now thanks to the algorithms, it’s a smaller social sphere that is more specific to certain types of content. The algorithms, as helpful as they can be at times, are quite flawed. According to an article, social media algorithms are optimizing to certain demographics without reaching a broader audience. In some ways, this is a good thing. Imagine following 700 users on Twitter that tweet all day, every day? Your timeline would be completely clustered. So yes, in some ways we need the algorithm, however the main concern is that algorithms will not be able to help a brand or person reach a larger audience — at the end of the day, it only allows you to see what you want to see and what you feel is relevant for YOU. Because of the algorithms, we no longer see things we might be curious in. We no longer get content from platforms to educate ourselves about things we don’t know about. All we see is what we have conditioned our feeds to fuel us with; it’s a constant need to see posts from the same people, pages and products on our day-to-day basis rather than a larger outreach of those three Ps that we all know is still out there, still to be discovered.
Questions worth asking ourselves
At the end of the day, we’re just consumers of this social media algorithm. However, there is truth behind the fact that this curated content of ‘convenience’ forces us to give up our freedom of self-expression. Algorithms are impacted by values and ethics, and as those change, so do the algorithms. As worrying as this is, to date, there’s no way to avoid the social media algorithms. The most powerful forms of AI run these algorithms and they’re always going to be two, five or even ten steps ahead of the consumer. However, we need to be more broad with our options. We need to search things we might not typically think of searching, or creep someone’s IG page that we have no history with. It’s not in our nature to do so, as humans comply with what’s most convenient and necessary for them, which is why the algorithms aren’t worried–yet. We have to try and start breaking free of this engineered AI system as soon as possible so that our future car, job and mortgage aren’t impacted by an algorithm that might not be completely accurate. What it all boils down to is this: Do you want the choice? Or do you want the algorithm to make it for you?