{"id":15654,"date":"2014-08-21T22:49:26","date_gmt":"2014-08-21T22:49:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/how-facebook-and-twitter-control-what-you-see\/"},"modified":"2014-08-21T22:49:26","modified_gmt":"2014-08-21T22:49:26","slug":"how-facebook-and-twitter-control-what-you-see","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/how-facebook-and-twitter-control-what-you-see\/","title":{"rendered":"How Facebook and Twitter control what you see about Ferguson"},"content":{"rendered":"

How Facebook and Twitter control what you see about Ferguson<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

invisiblelad<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Social media is controlled by algorithms \u2013 a mathematical formula that dictates what you see and when. In the past week, people have noticed something curious about the way these algorithms have filtered news about protests in Ferguson, Mo., over the fatal shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown.<\/p>\n

The fundamental differences between the two platforms help explain the disparity.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause of its brevity, and the ease with which updates can be shared, Twitter is a much more rapid-fire experience than Facebook, and that makes it well suited for quick blasts of information during a breaking-news event like Ferguson,\u201d Mathew Ingram of Gigaom pointed out. The non-newsy content that clutters the platform also makes it ill-suited for following breaking news, he added.<\/p>\n

Another huge difference? Algorithms. Your Twitter feed isn\u2019t controlled by an algorithm. You see the tweets of people you follow in real time. But Facebook uses a complicated algorithm to determine what ends up in your news feed. They won\u2019t reveal exactly how it works, but the company has said it ranks the content based in part on what you\u2019ve liked, clicked or shared in the past.<\/p>\n

Ars Technica\u2019s Casey Johnson suggested Facebook\u2019s algorithm also weeds out controversial content \u2014 racially charged protests, perhaps? \u2014 from users\u2019 news feeds: \u201cThere is a reason that the content users see tends to be agreeable to a general audience: sites like [BuzzFeed, Elite Daily, Upworthy, and their ilk] are constantly honing their ability to surface stuff with universal appeal. Content that causes dissension and tension can provide short-term rewards to Facebook in the form of heated debates, but content that creates accord and harmony is what keeps people coming back.\u201d
Johnson backed up her theory with a Georgia Institute of Technology study of how political content affects users\u2019 perceptions of Facebook. She summed up the findings: \u201cThe study found that, because Facebook friend networks are often composed of \u2018weak ties\u2019 where the threshold for friending someone is low, users were often negatively surprised to see their acquaintances express political opinions different from their own. This felt alienating and, overall, made everyone less likely to speak up on political matters (and therefore, create content for Facebook).\u201d<\/p>\n

For University of North Carolina sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, this sort of \u201calgorithmic filtering\u201d is more than a matter of technical differences. Last Wednesday, when there was rioting in Ferguson and journalists were being arrested, the events in Ferguson unfolded in real time on her Twitter feed. But on Facebook, where she follows a similar composition of friends, posts about Ferguson didn\u2019t appear in her feed until the next morning. \u201cWould Ferguson be buried in algorithmic censorship?\u201d she wrote on Medium..<\/p>\n

If so, that\u2019s bad. \u201cHow the internet is run, governed and filtered is a human rights issue,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How Facebook and Twitter control what you see about Ferguson invisiblelad: Social media is controlled by algorithms \u2013 a mathematical formula that dictates what you see and when. In the past week, people have noticed something curious about the way these algorithms have filtered news about protests in Ferguson, Mo., over the fatal shooting of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"link","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-link","hentry","category-words","post_format-post-format-link"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-44u","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15654"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15654\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}