How ‘engagement’ makes you vulnerable to manipulation and misinformation on social media - The Conversation
( September 10, 2021; The Conversation; Filippo Menczer )
This might be seen as an underappreciated strong point for Steemit. As with RSS, Steem content appears chronologically in our feeds. We choose who we follow and (with the minor exception of "pinned posts") no other people or algorithms are able to manipulate us by deciding what we see and what we don't.
Facebook has been quietly experimenting with reducing the amount of political content it puts in users’ news feeds. The move is a tacit acknowledgment that the way the company’s algorithms work can be a problem.
The heart of the matter is the distinction between provoking a response and providing content people want. Social media algorithms – the rules their computers follow in deciding the content that you see – rely heavily on people’s behavior to make these decisions. In particular, they watch for content that people respond to or “engage” with by liking, commenting and sharing.
As a computer scientist who studies the ways large numbers of people interact using technology, I understand the logic of using the wisdom of the crowds in these algorithms. I also see substantial pitfalls in how the social media companies do so in practice.
Read the rest from The Conversation: How ‘engagement’ makes you vulnerable to manipulation and misinformation on social media
As an aside, this reminds me of a Steemit feature that might be unknown to many newer Steemizens. Did you know that you can view someone else's feed? For example, here's https://steemit.com/@steemcurator01/feed, and here's mine. The same thing can be done by placing "/feed" in the URL after any steemit account.
Check the #penny4thoughts tag to find other active conversations.
Our country's social media dependence is increasing day by day. The number of people running this social media has increased exponentially and unimaginably due to the house arrest due to the outbreak of the epidemic corona. Many unemployed people enter Facebook to spend time. The lion's share of Facebook users in our country are lazy and unemployed people. There are some lazy and idle people who create content all day without any basis and create all kinds of debates. There is an opportunity to criticize anyone on social media if anyone wants. Many are deliberately or unwittingly using social media to humiliate certain people in various ways in the wake of their personal feuds. Which creates confusion in the minds of the people. The authorities should take steps to resolve this.
This article is a fact. Trending news these days is not that much about relevance, but more of manipulation.
And one of the worst parts is that even when you go to other so-called "news" sources, they spend an awful lot of time just parroting trending topics from Twitter or other social media platforms.
No recommendation on here steemit. We follow the people who's post we want to see in our feed, but facebook is not doing it, just take a side and suggest anything there.
In other words, we kind of choose our own manipulation. Because let's not kid ourselves: we tend to follow people we agree with
That's probably part of it. I definitely think we tend to sort ourselves into social media echo chambers. But the article points out that the algorithms amplify some voices and suppress others. The author argues that the manipulative part arises from the content that the algorithms choose to amplify and suppress.
No doubt. But it's still influenced by the choices we make, especially Youtube
what should we do on our devices to avoid the "manipulation" of those social media companies? as a layman in the field of information technology, I and probably many people want to avoid the "manipulation" of social media companies. I sometimes feel embarrassed, when I see ads that I no longer need but appear in my facebook feed, just because a few days ago I was searching on google.
thank you,
Best Regard
@aafadjar
Indonesian Steemians
Personally, I use the Brave browser and Presearch search engine to try to provide some level of privacy and avoid some of the manipulation. In the end, I don't think there's any way to consume Internet services and completely avoid it. I reckon that the most important things are to be skeptical of the things we see on the Internet and to seek out alternative viewpoints.
I've been using the search engine presearch service for my smartphone a few months ago, but sometimes to do certain searches I have to use google.
Screenshoot my presearch
The large social networks are designed so that in one way or another, they, through their algorithms, get to know us and this is largely achieved through psychology, all this is to manipulate us and thus take us on the path they want.
Social networks often misinform more than inform, on Facebook the important thing for content creators are likes, they even run raffles to achieve one of these likes, in this panel it is as you say, we decide who to follow and the best thing is that Many times you make friends, it is not a simple like, it is more, it is empathy, the human factor that is very important, good at least for me.
Everything is about centralization in this case we have to try decentralized options as steemit where you can post all you want or at least without feel scary about what will happen with your content
This day social media is the biggeat source of wrong information. Sometimes we become confused, so this will easily affect our child. We should take proper step against this misinformation.
The system of Facebook is being annoying day by day. There are a lot of fake information on Facebook and many people are sharing that to get sympathy or like and share. Thanks for the information abour feed.