Media & Algorithms
Karl Hoods CBE
Group Chief Digital & Information Officer | Multi Award Winning CIO | Technology & Digital NED| CDIO at Department for Energy Security & Net Zero and Department for Science Innovation & Technology
Following on from the themes in previous posts about machine learning and the data we all expose on a daily basis, some of the fallout from the recent US election has highlighted these issues in practice.
One of the organisations getting a lot of attention is Facebook. There have been more than a few accusations that it's partly to blame for Donald Trump becoming the 45th President of the United States.
Personally I don't entirely buy that argument but equally I don't deny that fact that Facebook is more of a media company than it is a technology company. The fact it doesn't produce any content itself is kind of irrelevant, that alone doesn't stop it being a distributor of news.
Facebook and many other sites curate content from lots of different sources, whether that is user generated or from the established media. They don't have teams of reporters or buy in content from other places to re-purpose, they let us post what we like. Whether that's good, bad or indifferent, right or wrong, fact or fiction - they don't really mind.
What organisations like this are increasingly doing though is controlling what we see through algorithms and we have little or know knowledge as to how it does this - where is the transparency and ethics check in this area?
This is a problem now and potentially worse to come with people getting used to having their news too filtered. Will there be future generations whose knowledge has been largely shepherded by the top ranked results or articles based on algorithms? In a world of increasingly short attention spans and a need for in the moment reactions this is a real concern. Will what children read become knowledge or is comprehension and retention of information being impeded by the sheer volume of data and ease in which is presented back to us?
Facebook shouldn't ever be anyone's single source of what's going on in the world but it's so embedded into many people's daily activity and it's easy to assume when you're rushing around between work and home that what you're seeing is fact, a collection of sources (fake or not) your friends and their friends have shared which Facebook have kindly aggregated into one easy to read digest.
It's this I keep reminding my own children of - don't be overly cynical but research, question and gain knowledge, because I know that increasingly their main interactions with this sort of information will be via social media - what I don't know is the algorithm used to select it.
Digital Directorate at Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS)
6 年It has always been the case that our understanding of the truth is determined by the information to which we have access. Before the printed word, we relied on story telling and people 'knew' what they were told, right or wrong. Nothing has changed other than the medium: we still only know what we're told and, like story telling, the stories get shared wider and wider with few of us ever challenging their integrity or accuracy. I see it every day with people sharing fake news and spam, thinking they're doing the rest of us a service, warning us about this or that, but never stopping to ask if it's true. It is just easier to hit Share than to check. It is vital schools (and parents) teach kids to apply critical thinking to everything they read or hear online (or offline, for that matter). We should also set better examples and call out misinformation when we see it - and to challenge our kids when they pass on misleading information. However, I fear that in a world where all of humanity's knowledge is available to all in an instant, we're less experienced at looking for quality and prefer instead to go with easy: does anyone ever check out page 2 on Google search results? I won't give up hope, but the challenge is massive! MLS
Creative at Archangel Entertainment
8 年You are so right Karl. I fear we have had the golden age of knowledge on tap and it is now a case of buyer beware in the minefield of information that is fed to us individually and collectively . What price truth in our brave new world then? Hope all is good with you btw.
Chief People Officer | Executive Coach | Performance Consultant
8 年Agreed. However the algorithms work in practice, the responsibility is on us to inform ourselves and that means weaning ourselves off being spoon fed what is simply popular or most appealing to us