Facebook Posts
Wide-ranging and opinionated conversation with my friends from COMMENT...have a listen!
Is the Family an Inviolable Sphere?
comment.org
What does it take to become a person who is deeply thoughtful, theologically well-formed, and resolutely compassionate? Anne Snyder talks with leaders like this who are pioneering fresh pathways of hope made real.5 days ago
I listened to it while driving. Well done!
Is there a transcript available?
I consider myself a careful social media user, but this piece in the Washington Post was an eye opener for me.
I'm excerpting liberally, but read the whole thing if you can.
**
When my son was born last year, friends from all over wanted to share in my joy. So I decided to post a photo of him every day on Instagram. Within weeks, Instagram began showing images of babies with severe and uncommon health conditions, preying on my new-parent vulnerability to the suffering of children. My baby album was becoming a nightmare machine.
This was not a bug, I have learned. This is how the software driving Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and lots of other apps has been designed to work…
I made my son a private Instagram account, and posted nothing but photos and videos of him smiling and snuggling. I followed the accounts of a handful of other babies from friends also longing to connect when covid-19 kept us apart. But there was a darker dynamic at work, too. On the app’s home screen and other tabs, Instagram mixes photos from my baby friends with suggested posts from strangers. At first, these algorithmically generated recommendations were neutral, such as recipes. After a few weeks, something caught my attention: Instagram was consistently recommending posts of babies with cleft palates, a birth defect. Soon after came suggested posts of children with severe blisters on their lips. Then came children attached to tubes in hospital beds…babies missing limbs, babies with bulging veins, babies with too-small heads, babies with too-big heads…
Once upon a time, Instagram’s main feed could actually come to an end, saying “you’re all caught up” after you’d seen everything shared by your friends. But over time, the company decided your friends alone aren’t enough to keep you opening its apps. So in 2020, Instagram started adding in algorithmically selected content you didn’t request to keep you around longer.
So how does it decide what to show you? The algorithms used by Instagram and Facebook look for “signals.” Some are obvious: Liking a post, following an account, or leaving a comment on a post are all signals. In my case, I didn’t do any of that with Instagram’s suggested posts. But Haugen explained you don’t have to “like” a darn thing for Instagram to pick up signals, because it’s monitoring every single thing you do in the app.
“The reality of being a new dad is that you are more vulnerable to the suffering of children,” Haugen says. “And I am sure when you run into one of the shocking photos, you're not intending to spend time on that photo, but you pause. And the algorithm takes note of that longer duration.”
It’s called “dwell time.” Otway, the Meta spokeswoman, confirmed even the speed of your scroll is a signal that feeds Instagram’s algorithm. So are a few other things Haugen said I likely did out of shock when I first saw these posts, such as tapping into an image to take a closer look….
Instagram’s judgments are, for the most part, invisible to us. If you’re a power user, you can get a few more clues by requesting to download all your Instagram data. Buried in the files is “your topics,” a list of everything the algorithm thinks you’re interested in, which is used to create recommendations.
When I did that, I saw Instagram had assigned my son’s account some 327 interests. Those included “disability” and “fear.”
That’s right, fear. I gave Instagram photos of my baby, and Instagram returned fear.
**
I gave Instagram photos of my baby. Instagram returned fear.
www.washingtonpost.com
Have you ever felt like recommendations on Instagram, TikTok or YouTube are dragging you down an unwanted rabbit hole? We the users need algorithm transparency and control.1 week ago
I haven't read the article yet, but I think it might work the other way, too. I scroll past anything objectionable as fast as I can, and try to never click on the click-baity stuff, only clicking on things I feel good about seeing, and my feed is either 1) mostly delightful, or 2) just as horrible as anyone else's, but since I'm so used to truly ignoring and passing by the nonsense, I'm only looking at what brings delight so it seems that way to me.
Don't post pictures of your kids. I know they're all grown, physically at least. And don't use TikTok ever.
I would very much love your next research project to delve into the *why* of this. It is so obviously amoral, and yet here we are. Fear is monetarily more lucrative, and I think we all KNOW this about social media and yet, here we are. What gives??
I read this today along with a long piece on adolescent suicide in the NYT that mentioned the effects of social media and smart phones. I do what I can to curate my feed by hiding spammy accounts.
This is nefarious. No wonder Instagram is so closely linked to teen anxiety.
I started posting my artwork to IG and it totally changed what I see. I think the algorithm is a scary beast, very different than FB. One of my former students found her photos were being used on a IG porn account. I’m sure the algorithms were helped by the photos teens post. Think how many times this happens to people and we wonder why teens are depressed with social media.
Still kinda shocked at the depth of depravity...but now it's AI.
You can close or hide ads you don’t want to see and they stop sending those type, usually
Scary stuff! Thankfully my Instagram has tons of cat and kitten content.
This is disturbing information. I'm tentative to write this comment for fear of what articles/updates I'll be receiving because of it.
Turn off all the ad content options on your phone.
Thanks for sharing.
I know for the past decade or so the news channels have tried to end each national news segment with a positive story. That was done with an extra effort because the popular stories are all negative: they were getting criticized for being all bad stories. We can feel better about ourselves if we read about misery elsewhere, so is it really such a big surprise that social media trends to the negative? You have a friend whose kid graduated, and another who was just diagnosed with cancer. You only have a couple minutes: which post are you going to open and read? 🤔
