WHO controls your Facebook News Feed? We are fed a specially selected diet of jokes, photos and gossip from our Facebook friends, but not by a person. Instead an algorithm does the work ā giving it the power to influence us.
The furore over an experiment in which Facebook researchers attempted to manipulate usersā emotions via their News Feed, albeit only slightly, highlighted the extent of that power.
Facebookās algorithms are a closely guarded secret. āThese are black boxes,ā says in Boston. āIn many cases the algorithms are held up as trade secrets, so thereās a competitive advantage to remaining non-transparent.ā
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For Karrie Karahalios and Cedric Langbort at the University of Illinois and Christian Sandvig at the University of Michigan, Facebookās influence is out of balance with our understanding of how its algorithm works. So they are carrying out what they call a collaborative audit, looking at the Facebook experiences of thousands of people to work out the underlying algorithmic rules.
To do this they have created an app called , which creates a stream of everything that your friends are posting. When I tried it, I saw an endless stream of comments, likes and posts by friends Iād forgotten I had. To the right I saw my standard News Feed, which was empty by comparison.
In their first, small study using FeedVis, the team found that most people ā 62 per cent ā didnāt know that the News Feed is automatically curated. People were shocked that they werenāt seeing everything their network posted. In cases where posts of close friends or family were excluded, many became upset.
The team is starting to understand some of the basic rules that govern what people see. āWe know that if you comment on someoneās wall, youāre more likely to see a post from them than if you just like something,ā says Karahalios. āAnd if you go to a personās timeline youāre more likely to see content from them later.ā The work was presented at the Berkman Center at Harvard University last week.
But Facebookās algorithms change constantly. āEven if I figure it out today, that doesnāt necessarily mean itāll be like that tomorrow,ā says Wilson.
To expand the experiment, the team will recreate a personās profile based on their likes, comments and other Facebook activity and then see if they can detect patterns in what their News Feed shows them.
Already, Facebook appropriates its usersā profiles to create adverts on their friendsā feeds that look like normal content. There are other tricks, too. āI could share a link to the McDonaldās website, commenting that a McLobster sounds disgusting,ā says . If you like that link, Facebook registers that you like McDonaldās. āIt doesnāt appear on your feed, but your friends will get ads that say āHal likes McDonaldāsā,ā he says.
Understanding these dynamics is crucial, as Facebook is increasingly the tool that people use to communicate and find out about their world. āIn the history of mass media, there have been channels with huge reach, but itās typically a human in the apex of the control loop,ā says Wilson. āThatās just not true any more.ā
ĀIn the history of mass media people were in control of what you saw. Thatās not true any moreĀ
This article appeared in print under the headline āFacebookās biggest secretā
