Our generation and Cyberspace are deeply intertwined from entertainment to socialization. The internet has a pretty large foothold in our everyday lives today in the modern world. I have a question for you all: When you scroll on Instagram or Tiktok, how does the app decide what kind of posts you interact with? What really makes up the “for you” page on these sites & apps?
Algorithms are a sorting tool of information that is based on your previous actions on the app. They have a goal of increasing your activity and time spent on the app, they will purposely show you content that they think you would interact with either liking, commenting, sharing, as long as it boosts their analytics and more importantly to increase the amount of money they make off of your interactions & time spent on the app. The algorithm’s job is to increase your engagement on the app, any way it can.
Interactions are key to how an algorithm functions, no matter what you do on these apps the algorithm will read it and enter it in its memory bank to later pull that information out and try to apply it when you scroll on your feed. From every send to every follow to every like it will read it and save it for later, after enough interactions on the app the algorithm will start categorizing concepts and subjects that you often interact with. For example if I were to like 100 videos today 20 of them were cat videos I can expect an increase of cat videos on my for you page tomorrow. Obviously the algorithm will show content that you like, but what about the opposite? Well that’s where the danger comes in. Not only does an algorithm know what kind of videos you like but what kind of videos you would dislike. With that information known, remember the original goal of an algorithm is to get you to interact with any videos, not necessarily videos you enjoy. It might show a political biased or straight up hateful video that goes against your beliefs just to get you to comment, worse of all it will also show the video to people who have the opposite opinion and random arguments will start in comment sections and the algorithm loves it because it boosted your comment interaction with other users, than it will learn that you frequently comment against a certain subject and from there it will show a video just so you comment and interact with it for the simple fact that it makes the companies analytics seem so much better.
How information is shared between Instagram and its individuals are entirely biased based on your specific personalized algorithm, this starts to become nasty once we start talking about Commerce & politics. Let’s start with everyone’s favorite subject to bring up at thanksgiving,the two party system in our parliament, Democrats and Republicans. We categorize political beliefs on a spectrum called the political compass, Algorithms will start depicting on what side of the political compass you’re on and either will show you radical concepts that would influence your belief in an extreme ways or influence you to try and fight for your beliefs, For example I was scrolling the Other day and I saw this dude preaching about the Aryan race right on my for you page and in the comment section, an entire community of Neo-Nazism & Right Wing Extremists right here for anyone to hear or see. As an educated & well informed person I saw this for what it was immediately. Losers online who impose their hate on others specifically to either harass minority groups online or try and pipeline younger audiences into their own hatred putrid beliefs. While not every account is as despicable as this one, think about the many accounts that hide messages within their posts and how this indoctrination sets in without users knowing they’re getting pushed to a certain side on the political scale. How many victims have fallen due to subliminal messaging and slight pokes in directions towards ideologies that they would never adopt if they weren’t being cast away by social media algorithms that prey on interaction. In this way these platforms have effectively given a way to promote extremism and especially considering how many minors interact with the internet, this is a direct attack on our younger generations that needs to be dealt with sooner, not later. We can’t allow this to happen, from political subliminal messaging, to a push towards advertisements that try and waste the buying power of the working class. Algorithms are harming people. Here we can see the cracks in the system, people are being dragged into subjects that they have no choice in viewing because it was already decided by a corporate controlled invisible code speaking algorithms that personalizes our feed to give in to our most polarizing emotions that we carry, from fear to love from hate to sorrow it impulses all of us to act in certain ways harming democracy & helping class division.
These Companies employ a parasitic business model. You download the app either out of your choice or because people you know are on the app. You start interacting with the app allowing the algorithm to start learning your behavioral patterns and what kind of content you would interact with. The algorithm now has an idea of how you use the app and what kind of content pulls your attention, it has the direct hand in control of what kind of videos you interact with, from companies to politics to meme pages it will start pulling your strings to get you to boost its analytics and user interaction. Besides pushing political messages or enticing the worst in humans, it’s recording all of your personal information and selling it to anyone they would like. Last month a controversial topic was the security in foreign apps like TikTok and what it does with American citizens’ data. But it’s not foreign companies that would bring us the most harm, no. The problem lies within our own backyards, American Companies take advantage of its citizens the most, it’s our companies that take our data and sell it on a way more massive scale compared to TikTok. We are talking about a 140 billion dollar industry of selling user data every year. Companies like Facebook, Google, Paypal, Amazon, Equifax, and plenty of others that you interact with daily are all American Companies that just bank on you agreeing their terms and services. They don’t care about you, they care about mass analytics, and watching their numbers grow.
Don’t take my word for it, read these sources.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/radical-ideas-social-media-algorithms/
https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/recommender-systems-and-amplification-extremist-content
https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/HateScape_v5.pdf
https://techpolicy.sanford.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2021/08/Data-Brokers-and-Sensitive-Data-on-US-Individuals-Sherman-2021.pdf
Disinformation, Radicalization, and Algorithmic Amplification: What Steps Can Congress Take?
https://hoofnagle.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/hoofnagle_facebook_google_data_brokers.pdf