It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when we’ve lost control of what we see, read, and even think about the biggest social media companies.
I said it around 2016. That was the year that Twitter and Instagram joined Facebook and YouTube in the algorithmic future. Ruled by robots programmed to hold our attention for as long as possible, they promoted things we would most likely tap, share, or love – and bury everything else.
Bye-bye, feeds showing everything and everyone we followed in an infinite, chronologically ordered river. Hello, energetic feeds that came up with must-clicks.
Around the same time, Facebook – whose news feed has been powered by algorithms since 2009 – hid the setting to switch back to ‘Most Recent’.
No problem, you probably thought, if you thought about it at all. Except that these opaque algorithms didn’t just drop the news from T.Swift’s latest album. They also maximized the range of the incendiary bombs – the attacks, the misinformation, the conspiracy theories. They pushed us further into our own hyperpolarized filter bubbles.