Guest post by Beth Eyres, English Faculty | eCourses Faculty Lead
This summer, I quit Facebook.* I was a reluctant joiner years ago, but once I was on it, I liked it. Like most people, I connected with family in California, Washington, Illinois, and other faraway places; got to see pictures of my nephews playing lacrosse and the cello; saw that former students were leading successful lives, and I had new experiences in real life with new friends from those connections. Facebook’s mission “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” sounded nice and…true.
But then last semester, Holly Jacobus, Autumn McKelvey, and I chose fake news as a topic for our ENG102 student synthesis papers. We really didn’t know how that topic would grow as the semester moved on. At the end of the semester, long after the synthesis assignment, students still brought up fake news. I didn’t know how involved Facebook would be in the spread of fake news, nor that I would get the fake news they thought I wanted to see based on their algorithms. Starting to catch the fake news stories started to change my opinion about Facebook.
This summer, after reading the book Weapons of Math Destruction: How Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy and especially the chapter “The Targeted Citizen: Civic Life,” the power that Facebook has really became clear. They experimented with a “voter megaphone” to see if they could get more people to vote. Using the “I voted” button, the researchers estimated that they “increased voter turnout by 340,000 people” (O’Neil, 2016, p. 181). Later, and even with more deliberation, researchers “altered the news feed algorithm for about two million people” (p. 182). These people received more news in their feed and fewer fluff posts. Researchers determined that they increased voter turnout by 3%. Not only has Facebook experimented on increasing voter turnout, but they’ve also experimented on changing people’s moods, something potentially darker and far less patriotic sounding. Epstein and Robertson (2015) discovered that “emotional states can be transferred to others…, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness” (as cited in O’Neil, 2016, p. 184). Facebook currently has 2 billion monthly users. How many minds can be changed and about which topics? The influence, for good or evil, is immense.
These experiments are, hopefully, innocuous. But the conclusions they all reach point to the massive influence Facebook could have if they chose to use it. I’m not a paranoid person, but I am reluctantly a little cynical. As a teacher, the conclusions take on new meaning. I used to teach a media unit where I taught my students ways to “read” media like commercials, ads, even film. But how do I teach them to critically examine something that can’t be seen–the algorithm? The experiments? The manipulations are getting more sophisticated. Any of us could be a victim of this modern manipulation.
*I’m back on Facebook because I starting getting text messages from friends who thought I unfriended them. And, apparently, some other friends sent out a Facebook search party to find me. It’s really hard to quit Facebook. But I have limited my likes, quit 80% of groups, unliked pages I had liked, and basically tried to feed less information into the algorithm.