“The Algorithm”

I keep hearing a lot of references to “The Algorithm” in conversations pertaining to how social media is inciting people to become more hateful and devisive. Whilst I agree that social media is likely going to need substantial changes to prevent this kind of behavior continuing, I can’t help but think that contrary to belief this isn’t actually how it was, or even is, designed. As someone who has seen how digital products are designed and developed, I can kind of see why this is occuring as a “natural” byproduct.

Tribes

Humans are inherently tribal, and we like to engage with people that are on the same wavelength as us. It takes quite a lot of mental management to insist on reading things you disagree with on a purely objective level, especially when it comes to thinks such as politics.

When we’re on social media, with literally five billion potential connections, it’s pretty likely that you’re going to start with people that are like you; people you can connect with easily. You post stuff they like… They post stuff you like it. Simple. Why would you bother to go befriend someone with more differing views… it’s not like you’ll enjoy their content.

It’s not just facebook and twitter that do this, reddit is a prime example of an ecosystem built on echochambers. The whole platform is designed to group together likeminded people. An argument can certainly be made for the benefits of this kind of platform for things as casual as train ehtusiasts, or bronies getting together to talk bronie things.

The issue is that when we introduce a tribal mentality, humans are more inclined to move towards aggressive behavior to those outside of their group.

We don’t even need a “r/” tag, or a hastag to determine who’s in our group either. There’s plenty of reserach to suggest that humans invent their own language barriers to differentiate those inside our tribes from everyone else. Look at r/formuladank and their “sbinalla”, or the Imgur user “ih8mypp”, referenced in hundreds of thousands of comments on the site. We unconciously gatekeep our tribes to make sure we know who’s who and feel like we’ve a connection to people we’ve never met - those in-the-know.

This, all paired with pseudo-anonymity, and we’ve got a recipe for total disaster, frankly. Anonymity is shown to induce a propensity for doing things we otherwise might not, if we were to be held accountable for it.

The North Star

When Marky Z got together with his mates and came up with Facebook, the plan was to connect people, and it worked… really well. As facebook grew, it became the defacto social media platform for expressing opinions about anything and everything. You wanted to tell your mates what you had on your toast? There’s your place.

Some of these ideas were so potent that we needed to post it there for it to become “official”, such was the case with the Relationship Status. If you weren’t publicly broadcasting it, you weren’t really serious about it.

These days Facebook et al maintain their user base simply by driving engagement from users, and I can almost guarantee that at no point during the design of The Algorithm was there any mention of driving people towards more extreme opinions or hateful behavior, but a simple a question put to the product team: “How do we measure success”.

This is what’s known in the industry as a North Star. It’s a single ballpark metric for “are we going in the right direction”. There’s an implied value being delivered to the customer, and a direct correlation with the success of the business. A couple of examples might help elaborate:

• Spotify: number of minutes listened to

• AirBnB: rooms booked

With social media, the answer to the question of “measuring success”, as I’ve already eluded to, is “engagement”. Undoubtedly the North Star for almost all social media enterprises is “Engagements with other people”. For those who are reading this thinking “but it’s not though, Facebook’s north star is actually Monthly Active Users”… sure… but that might as well be “people engaging with other people on facebook”, which is essentially “engagement”. Eat it.

It seems pretty likely that Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and the likes won’t actually care* if they are friendly engagements or not, because any engagement with the platform or another person is more revenue, which is exactly the purpose of the North Star.

So, 1 + 1 = 3?

Pretty much. This might all just be a really bad case of Unintended Consequences.

As with all well-intended products, there’s always some moron (or army thereof) that find ways to make it do something unintended. But hey, we need someone to blame right… so we’re going to sit Zucky in front of the US Senate and (essentially) ask “Our citizens are being assholes, Mark… why do you make them assholes?”.

These platforms were most likely designed with the intention of facilitating social interactions akin to those we’d have face to face; A platform that enables you to reach out to your dunbar bands, and communicate more regularly.

It might just be a case of people being people, and the overpopulation of opinion essentially boiling up our tribes to take part in a pseudo-anonymous battle of will, with and against people we don’t even know. Those battles drive the engagement metrics up, so job’s a good’un 🤷‍♂️

It’s been public knowledge for a while now that the quality of engaging per-user content generated by the likes of TikTok, Google and Youtube is a result of The Algorithm using huge amounts of data from your previous choices and behaviors. And I’ll admit, it’s probably really difficult to measure “content the user likes” without just ending up back at the “engagement” metric. This should be relatively obvious to anyone who’s browsed the TikTok of another user. My partner only gets cat videos and hair styling; I get rockets and DIY videos. If I spent more time liking, commenting on and watching videos of people combing their beard, there’s no doubt The Algorithm is going to “notice” and start feeding me more of that content to keep me using the platform for longer.

This all sounds relatively harmless when we’re talking about cat videos, but what if it’s Klan members posting their latest rally? The same algorithm that’s feeding you hundreds of cat videos a day is the same algorithm feeding KKK members videos of racism and hatred of fellow humans.

TikTok, Reddit and Youtube are all great examples of algorithmic echo chambers designed to drive engagement. Twitter and Facebook are really good platforms for driving those that take part in controversial conversations to more of the same. The Algorithm doesn’t know that it’s doing this, it is just using it’s measurement of success and saying “I did a good job, didn’t I daddy?”, and the owners of these companies look down lovingly, pat it gently on the head and whisper “yeah… yeah you did”…

… all whilst watching the world burn, and the cash flow in.

* I’m not saying for certain that they don’t not care… I’m just saying that it seems highly likely they don’t because revenue incentivises them not to.