Even Facebook Doesn ’ t Understand Facebook ’ s Algorithms

After all the hand-wringing that came from the “fake news” spectacle courtesy of Facebook’s news feed — the thing you see when you log into Facebook from your phone or laptop — one thing has become abundantly clear. Even Facebook doesn’t understand Facebook. And that’s the problem with relying on an algorithmic artificial intelligence (AI) that has been built (or more accurately, pieced together) over the years by hundreds of different developers and programmers. This all became clear to me over the past few days as I mulled over the things I learned at the latest HealtheVoices 2017 conference, and reading an excellent article about Facebook by Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times Magazine. At the conference, a Facebook representative faced a somewhat frustrated (and at times, nearly hostile) questioning crowd about why the stuff they wrote as health activists and advocates seemed rarely to surface on other people’s Facebook news feeds. The only way it seemed to get engagement, said people in the audience that day, was to purchase it through Facebook (via a paid-for mechanism called “boosting” a post). The Facebook representative had no answer to give to these questions about why seemingly high-quality, good content isn’t being surfaced in their news feed. Yet every single participant I spoke to — passionate, engaged health advocates — saw it as a problem with Facebook. But even Facebook couldn&#...
Source: World of Psychology - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Brain and Behavior General Minding the Media Policy and Advocacy Psychology Technology Algorithm Artificial Intelligence Facebook Pew Research Center understanding facebook Source Type: blogs