In challenging times we seek certainty or the illusion of same through information or data seeking.
Care is needed when consuming the junk food that media has become. The access to snack food (m and m commercial anyone?) packaged into convenient snippets, avoids the need to think at first glance.
On the road to finding certainty through consuming empty-media-calories, one can end the day feeling unsatiated.
#BeAwareOfTheAlgorithms
“Facebook should do everything in its power to prevent its tools and algorithms from driving people toward self-reinforcing echo chambers of extremism (which can) have dangerous (and life-threatening) real-world consequences.”
ref: Facebook civil-rights record hammered in own review
“Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” read a slide from a 2018 presentation. “If left unchecked,” it warned, Facebook would feed users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.”
“The high number of extremist groups was concerning, the presentation says. Worse was Facebook’s realization that its algorithms were responsible for their growth. The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”
What an interesting time we live in.