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 â giving it the power to influence us.
The furore over an experiment in which Facebook researchers attempted to manipulate usersâ emotions via their News Feed, albeit only slightly, highlighted the extent of that power.
Facebookâs algorithms are a closely guarded secret. âThese are black boxes,â says in Boston. âIn many cases the algorithms are held up as trade secrets, so thereâs a competitive advantage to remaining non-transparent.â
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For Karrie Karahalios and Cedric Langbort at the University of Illinois and Christian Sandvig at the University of Michigan, Facebookâs 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 Iâd 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 â 62 per cent â didnât know that the News Feed is automatically curated. People were shocked that they werenât 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. âWe know that if you comment on someoneâs wall, youâre more likely to see a post from them than if you just like something,â says Karahalios. âAnd if you go to a personâs timeline youâre more likely to see content from them later.â The work was presented at the Berkman Center at Harvard University last week.
But Facebookâs algorithms change constantly. âEven if I figure it out today, that doesnât necessarily mean itâll be like that tomorrow,â says Wilson.
To expand the experiment, the team will recreate a personâs 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 usersâ profiles to create adverts on their friendsâ feeds that look like normal content. There are other tricks, too. âI could share a link to the McDonaldâs website, commenting that a McLobster sounds disgusting,â says . If you like that link, Facebook registers that you like McDonaldâs. âIt doesnât appear on your feed, but your friends will get ads that say âHal likes McDonaldâsâ,â he says.
Understanding these dynamics is crucial, as Facebook is increasingly the tool that people use to communicate and find out about their world. âIn the history of mass media, there have been channels with huge reach, but itâs typically a human in the apex of the control loop,â says Wilson. âThatâs just not true any more.â
ÂIn the history of mass media people were in control of what you saw. Thatâs not true any moreÂ
This article appeared in print under the headline âFacebookâs biggest secretâ
