That experience doesn’t just include the bullying endemic to Twitter it also includes the content of the tweets themselves. Google, Disney and Salesforce all backed away from buying the microblogging company in 2016 for two reasons: Twitter hasn’t been able to successfully monetize its users ( unlike Facebook), and Twitter has a growing reputation among current and former users as being unconcerned with the quality of user experience. We’ve already seen this happen with Twitter. If those users perceive a reason to flee Facebook-if they feel it’s biased, untrustworthy, routinely violating their safety or creating social friction-then the data sets Facebook sells to advertisers and publishers become less valuable, meaning the company eventually loses value. But Facebook’s monopoly depends on it maintaining its user base of 1.9 billion active users, all of whom generate monetizable content for Facebook. ![]() Facebook is considered a great long-term stock buy right now because it’s virtually monopolizing a market-MySpace is an also-ran, Google+ is a niche product, and LinkedIn was bought so it could become a data collection mechanism for Microsoft’s suite of machine learning-enhanced workplace tools. Who cares? Social media investors should. Farhad Manjoo’s examination of how Facebook is trying to offset its own complicity in the filter effect sums up the company’s challenge, “The solution to the broader misinformation dilemma-the pervasive climate of rumor, propaganda and conspiracy theories that Facebook has inadvertently incubated-may require something that Facebook has never done: ignoring the likes and dislikes of its users.” To watch Mark Zuckerberg reposition himself as a tech executive straining to move outside the Silicon Valley bubble-from the visit-every-state tour to the pro-community manifesto that asks, “How do we help people build an informed community that exposes us to new ideas and builds common understanding in a world where every person has a voice?”-is to watch Facebook try to thread the needle between corporate self-interest and public interest in things like cohesive public discourse, open access and quality journalism. Sorry?” (It helps that there’s a study that points out their role in the media failures of 2016.) So what? Unlike a certain search engine that weights results instead of providing organic returns to user inquiry, social media companies are now shrugging sheepishly and saying, “Yeah, we totally contributed to the siloing of social discourse. Ask yourself: Do any of your social media services or search engines work on randomization? Or do they all show you what they think you want to see? ![]() ![]() ![]() In the tests they did, the only group that was likely to spend significant time reading articles that challenged their beliefs was the one in which the news feed was randomized, not weighted by user preference or an algorithm based on prior user behavior. In “The dark side of technology: An experimental investigation of the influence of customizability technology on online political selective exposure,” Dyelko and his coauthors report that people are much more likely to click and spend time on articles that reflect their pre-existing biases. At least, that’s what SUNY Buffalo communication professor Ivan Dyelko and his research team found. You reinforce the walls of your personal information bubble. Facebook effectively creates personalized information bubbles for its users.
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