Dirty Algorithm

7/21/2020

David A. Windham

Dirty Algorithm

I logged into the Twitter for the first time in about six years this last week. I’ve been using it to keep tabs on the Covid-19 numbers from DHEC and I’ve really appreciate the folks making charts. After about a week of tracking, I saw that one of the fellas was getting down on himself over the fact that he’d been so absorbed with charting the results. It was also likely that it is depressing watching the uncontrolled spread in real time, so I made my first post in about five years with a little pep-em-up response. I’m not a fan of the social medias and although I’ve posted about here on several occasions, I’m going to do another quick follow up about one point that I think is really important right now.

When I read the news, of which I have an on again off again relationship with, I will not sign into any single source or aggregator. I do this because I do not want my results sorted in any personalized way. I mainly use an old school RSS reader with a list of trusted sources for the majority of my news reading. And when I’m using a third party aggregator I’d like to the results as they would be shown to any anonymous reader. I do realize that my IP is consistently being used and I make an effort to flop that around on occasion too. As I’m reading, I will purposely click through articles with headlines I don’t find interesting simply to keep those sources in my feed. I do all of this in an effort to keep the algorithms of the internet from having an effect on the content I’m presented.

I also logged into Facebook this week. I logged off about five years ago, but left my account in place. I wanted to read the teacher responses to a local newspaper article about the reopening of our schools. Unfortunately, our local newspaper and the majority of our local citizens use Facebook regularly to communicate with one another. I don’t fault them for it, but I don’t think they entirely understand how it works. Namely the sorting algorithms that are put in place to encourage engagement and usage. So, if I respond to a particular person’s post then algorithm is determines that I should receive a more of that persons postings in my home feed. Although seemingly innocuous and with the general intent of increasing engagement, the overall effect of which is a siloing of information. I work my way through Facebook for a year or two and soon my feed has been so customized that I don’t even realize that what has been removed and even the adverts are tailored to my interest. So about year three or four of my usage, I started purposely engaging in random users postings in an effort to confuse the algorithmic sorting. It sort of worked, but then I started to really dislike what I was seeing from other folks. It worked, I was now disengaged and I deleted a bunch of them. Wash-repeat and within a year I was completely disinterested and quit. So my effort to confuse the algorithms led to me quitting.

My point gets a bit darker. It’s not all boring dystopia and I’m not going to rehash my previous posts about how extremism is cultivated or political systems are manipulated_1,2,3, but I would like to emphasize that when Henry Ford put the combustion engine automobile into mass production, he didn’t anticipate the effects of automotive emissions. When Albert Einstein set the state for the invention of the atomic bomb, he later wrote that “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”₄ Likewise I don’t believe that the engineers at Google are going against their oft cited and now abandoned slogan of “Don’t Be Evil”₅. I do, however, believe that there has been unfortunate unintended consequences of their algorithmic searches. If I, the user, don’t make a concerted effort to avoid the tools they’ve designed to keep me engage and improve my search results, I’m handed a list of information I already tend to agree with. I’m certainly not looking for that. I’m looking for information that challenges my belief system and broadens my perspective. It’s what continual learning is all about and at the core of every education system. I guess that I’m likely in the minority on this, but I think it’s something that could really help a lot of folks.