It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when we lost control of what we see, read, and even think about in larger social media companies.
I got it right around 2016. It was the year that Twitter and Instagram joined Facebook and YouTube in the algorithmic future. Led by robots programmed to hold our attention for as long as possible, they promoted things we would probably touch, share, or hear and bury everything else.
Goodbye, feeds that showed it all and everyone we followed in an endless, chronologically ordered river. Hello, high energy feeds that have appeared with required clicks.
At about the same time, Facebook, whose news feed has been powered by algorithms since 2009, hid the settings to return to “Most Recent.”
There would probably be no problem, if you thought about it. Unless these opaque algorithms not only maximized the news of T. Swift’s latest records. They also maximized the scope of arsonists: attacks, misinformation, and conspiracy theories. They pushed us further into our own hyperpolarized filter bubbles.