Facebook’s algorithms are not your friend

Persuasive, important argument; but does writing and submitting this now mean that you are depriving yourself of the pleasure of watching the Republican debate? Are there other possible problems with algorithmic feeds due to the way users will be profiled?

Just a few days after releasing a new version of the Greenhouse 100 (a list of the top greenhouse gas emitters in the U.S.) the site that I host the detailed information on was taken down Why? Because the hosting provider had Emailed me two warnings that I was using too much disk space , and gmail had decided that these warnings were spam so that I never saw them. (The hosting provider, Hostgator, does have a habit of sending spammy offers of various kinds that apparently use the same Email address as serious notices.) After they’d decided that I was ignoring their requests to delete files it took me 4 days to convince Hostgator to put the server back up.

Does this mean that “I want ALL my emails!” and that I won’t be using a spam filter? No. The magic of the marketplace has ensured that I’ll get so much spam if I don’t use one that I’ll probably miss even more messages. Note that as with so much under capitalism, my wonderful range of consumer choices is actually quite restricted and the available solutions come down to the lesser evil.

Yes, good points, Henry.

As you can probably guess, I have about a million thoughts on the topic. (Few people know this, but my interests in Internet skills initially developed as a response to the potential power that “portal sites” (the search engines of the late 90s) would have in channeling user attention (see Hargittai 2000 in Poetics). The question I posed was whether higher Internet skill level could help people route around those systems better.

Just a couple of points. First, can we please have more empirical studies about algorithms and less hand-waving at this point? To clarify, I’m not critiquing the post or the piece to which it points, I’m critiquing the related academic literature on the topic. Twenty years into related matters, it’s getting really old for people to say “algorithms will xyz” without getting their hands dirty and empirically testing the claims. (Again, this isn’t directly about this post, I’m just using it as an opportunity to rant about this point.)

Second, as the OP notes, FB’s business model very much must depend on the quality of its algorithms. It is shocking then how poor it seems (based on anecdotal evidence). Has anyone else gotten the Happy Friends Day video compilation on their feed? Mine had a few okay matches, but it was a bizarre compilation for the most part, I’ve heard similar comments from others. And a colleague had a picture of her with her deceased (for a few years now) husband on the cover. They already got in trouble for making that kind of a mistake in the past, hopefully they keep on tweaking away.

I have so many more thoughts on FB and its algorithm, I really need to write a post one of these days…

Every moment spent looking at a screen is a moment less to spend with friends and family in meat space. I was a relatively early adopter of many things internet. I’m now mostly out of the stream. We send paper letters and cards to those we care about, and receive the same now and then. Two thank you notes from my cousin’s kids to our family were recent high points. I (try to) separate the time I spend online or working on my computer from my meat space existence. When out of the house my smartphone remains on airplane mode, or is simply left on my desk. It feels great to step out into the world unencumbered by any connection to the world of zeros and ones. In our first class of the term all students are required to bring their smart phones out, turn the power off, look at their smart phones, and say good-bye. The sense of separation for some is palpable. Phones are secured in bags and bags are placed at the back of the class. Then class starts.
I use the camera in my laptop to record presentations, interactions, and exercises. And for monitoring. In short, I control my connection to the internet. It doesn’t (entirely) control me. I suffer the suggestions from sites I visit and understand that clicking on any link changes the ads that appear on my screen. All I need to do is remember not to click the adds, and that’s easy. I agree that a driver-less car will be a very welcome development for many. I commute entirely on foot and by train. I try to walk an extra mile or so each way to work. On the train, I can work if I feel the need. I find the time is better spent just thinking free, cellphone turned off, or on airplane mode. But that’s me.

One would assume that the Ad industry would be the most advanced in terms of social media algorithms. But if I buy timber shelves online (after having surfed half a dozen bookshelf-selling vendor sites), the next thing I used to see (pre Ad-block days) on YouTube (where I watch music instructional videos) was… 3 months of ads for timber bookshelves. That just shows how primitive such algorithms are. They are a LONG way from really ‘knowing you’.

My impression of the younger generation is that you can’t fool them that there is no manipulation going on – sites like factcheck.org and memepoliceman.com are evidence of this. So no matter how smart your ads (a certain South Park episode comes to mind) or genuine-looking your content, they know they are being lied to in subtle ways. The bottom line is that if they don’t get exactly what they want, they’ll dump your site/service like a lump of plutonium.

Older internet inhabitants are not that far behind. The days of dumbly absorbing any internet content as ‘straight’ are gone the way of ad-infected broadcast TV (hence the adblock war). The internet consumer of today cherrypicks what he/she wants and tosses the rest, overnight if need be. Good lucking taming that!

Every moment spent looking at a screen is a moment less to spend with friends and family in meat space.

Yes, probably literally lifesaving for many people with desperate family lives.

Twitter is an enormously profitable company. If it simply fired all of its engineers and collected profits on the existing revenue, it would be a great business. It only seems like a business “in search of a business model” because it’s trying to be Facebook and it isn’t.

The problem is that “algorithm” is too vague. It covers everything from simple steps with a clear relationship to clear goals, all the way to impenetrable thickets of what a computer scientists would call logic but a logician would call garbage. “Heuristic” would be a better word here, not because it’s perfect but because it more clearly gets at the fuzziness and variability that’s the problem here.

Some people are more likely to be comfortable with self-driving cars because, as complex as that activity is, it involves rules that apply equally to everybody and the way that a computer can find solutions seems relatively clear (even though there are surely some heuristics involved). A(n) heuristic Twitter feed is very different. Everybody knows that there is no universal set of heuristics. They know that different people would place a different weight on how recent a tweet is, likes given to the tweet, like given by the reader to the author before, likes given by *anyone* to the author before, author’s tweet frequency, etc. They know that a single Twitter-developed algorithm can not satisfy everyone. On Facebook right now, one of my friends is complaining about how their heuristics make posts from rarely-heard-from friends almost impossible to find, and many are agreeing with her. There’s no “solution” here and thus no optimal algorithm.

I don’t think it’s really inconsistent or peculiar for people to have these different attitudes toward self-driving cars and Twitter/Facebook feeds, if you look more closely at the specific nature and application of algorithms in each case.

I don’t understand the reasoning behind Tabarrok’s analogy at all. A self-driving car might use an algorithm to decide what route it should take to get me to my desired destination. This may or may not be a good thing – there are presently several applications, of which the most famous is probably Waze, that crowdsource route selection based on input from other users, and there have been both positive and negative consequences of that approach (ask me, sometime, to tell you about the day Waze decided that a road that had been flooded and closed was the fastest segment for its commuters to use, because there were no cars on it).

But I don’t think anyone is interested in using a self-driving car that decides for you where you should go. And that is the correct analogue for what twitter is trying to do with its algorithmic timeline.

It’s a peculiar strawman of an argument by AT though, because people weren’t complaining about the use of ‘algorithms ‘ (whatever that might mean in this context) but the actual specific changes twitter were planning to make to the way twitter functions.
I think AT’s last line is the most relevant point:

“As Tyler argued in Average is Over, the future belongs to people who can defer to the algorithm.”

It isnt the technology that interests Tabarrok , but (as with the likes of Cowen and Andreessen ) it’s the societal consequences. They actually do believe (where I think theyre probably correct) that there are a new class of genuinely brilliant people, doing astonishing things, who (where they lose the run of themselves) we should all instinctively trust and outsource all thinking too.
Tabarrok , Cowen and Andreessen are the courtiers who want to reinstate a new improved version of feudalism. This might seem overwrought, and I dont mean to denigrate them by saying it, but it’s absolutely the only reasonable reading of their body of work . So the objections in the OP dont really apply to Tabarrok et al because they are features of the society they want to create, not bugs.

Facebook has adopted the same business model used by the television industry since its beginnings. We are the product they sell to their customers, the advertisors.

I am of the opinion that economic systems tend to (d)evolve into some form of feudalism.
Whether it is Soviet/Maoist state feudalism or Capitalist private feudalism.

Haven’t read Pedro Domingos yet. But from an interview
Question: What is the difference between the algorithms that Netflix and Amazon use to recommend products you might like? Why is it important for consumers to be aware of these differences?

PD: Like every company, Netflix and Amazon each use the algorithms that best serve their purposes. Neflix loses money on blockbusters, so its recommendation system directs you to obscure British TV shows from the 70s, which cost it virtually nothing. The whole machine learning smarts is in picking shows for you that you’ll actually like even though you’ve never heard of them. Amazon, on the other hand, has no particular interest in recommending rare products that only sell in small quantities. Selling larger quantities of fewer products actually simplifies its logistics. So its recommendation system is based more on just how popular each product is in connection with the products you’ve bought before. The problem for you if you don’t know any of this is that you wind up doing what the companies want you to do, instead of what you want to do.

If you know — even just roughly — how the learning algorithms work, you can make them work for you by deliberately teaching them, by choosing the companies whose machine learning agrees best with you and by demanding that the learning algorithms let you explicitly say things like “This is what I want, not that,” and “Here’s where you went wrong.”

” The assistant also reads half a dozen newspapers before you wake to find the articles he thinks that you will most want to read that morning.”

Epistemic closure for everyone!

Henry@27 (https://crookedtimber.org/2016/02/07/facebooks-algorithms-are-not-your-friend/#comment-658052 – for some reason (deleted comments?) the “@{N}” for comment N doesn’t always refer to the comment to which the person appears to be replying):

Pandora’s “Brazilian Radio” channel appears to think that Brazilian music consists of 1) “Girl from Ipanema”, 2) “One-Note Samba”, 3) “The Waters of March”, and 4) everything else, and plays each of those 4 equally frequently.

Me@32:

OK, so maybe there are “courtiers” who aren’t that rich but say what the rich want to be heard and “courtiers” who really are that rich and say what they want to be heard, and perhaps Andreessen is in the second category whilst Cowen and Tabarrok are in the first category (they don’t pop up the way Marc does when you ask Mr. Google about their net worth, for what that’s worth).

Paul Bernal has written a great post on why algorithmically driven twitter feeds are a bad idea, including some specific use cases where having a time-ordered stream is precisely what makes it useful.

He also makes the point very clearly that algorithmic objectivity is an illusion:

The idea of using algorithms is very attractive, but it’s underpinned by an illusion that algorithms are somehow ‘neutral’ or ‘fair’. This is what brings about the idea that Google is a neutral indexer of the internet and a guardian of free speech, but it really is an illusion. Algorithms are human creations and embed ideas and biases that those who create them may well not even be aware of. They can make existing power imbalances worse, as the assumptions that underpin those imbalances are built into the very thought processes that create the algorithms. Yes, people can compensate, but even that act of compensation can bring about further biases. Where the essence of the idea behind an algorithm is to make Twitter more money, then that bias itself will interfere with the process, consciously, subconsciously or otherwise.

So, in short, for many twitter users, the timeline is both practically and conceptually the whole point. The only two problems with that are first that that works least well for new users – it takes time to get to a rich and well-tune timeline – and secondly that Twitter as an organisation doesn’t seem to share the power users’ passion. Those two problems are closely connected – so perhaps the real challenge it to find a way of introducing and supporting new users which amounts to more than ‘here are some celebrities you can follow (but who will ignore you completely)’.

songza has moved to google music. kinda hard to find but this is the link.

i like the curated songlists.

https://play.google.com/music/listen#/now

spotify does do a good job finding songs for discover weekly

http://qz.com/571007/the-magic-that-makes-spotifys-discover-weekly-playlists-so-damn-good/

probably the best algoritmic music discovery. shame that it works best the first time you use it

Whether or not I want a self-driving car depends entirely on whether it goes where I want or where some Google algorithm decides or even worse where some NSA-funded Google algorithm decides.

Troy: What city do you live in? Just want to know for my own safety.

Troy, but self-driving cars are, as I understand, safer than regular cars. I can easily imagine a future whereby governments force the adoption of them, meaning to drive you would have to use a self-driving car, and you might not have the individual choice over the algorithm. The algorithm that determines things in my scenario will be decided upon at a societal and corporate level.

CJColucci@4: “I don’t want a self-driving car and don’t know anyone who does. Do people really want this? If so, why?”

People still living in suburban car-commute hell look forward to self-driving cars because they seem like a drop-in technical fix: they dream of living *exactly the way they do now*, but rather than staring nervously at the bumper in front of them, they’ll be able to spend all their time on the net (where they’ll tell everyone about how wonderful this new gadget is that they have and you don’t).

With self-driving cars, we’ll no doubt see some safety and energy-efficiency improvements, but we’ll also see an amazing enabler of suburban sprawl: people will be willing to put up with commutes twice as long as they do now.