What happens when we apply page relevance to the news?

In a world where search engines have a huge say in what we see online, it’s probably fair to say by now that page relevance is one of the great challenges of our time. As the saying goes: if it isn’t on the first Google page, it doesn’t exist. But having come to terms with SEOs and search algorithms, we must now grasp another aspect of relevance: news.

Companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, Snapchat, and a few others are working round the clock on what probably will be the biggest change in how we find out what’s going on in the world in a long time: the moment when most of the news we read is no longer in a newspaper, but on a social network.

In reality, this is a trend that has been underway for some time now: have a look at your own habits and you’ll likely see that your traditional news diet will have been supplemented by content via Facebook or Twitter. The process now underway is a shift from our natural tendency to share news with each other to a much more organized approach by commercial initiatives such as Snapchat Discover, Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News, or Google and Twitter’s recently announced collaboration.

For the mainstream media, having their news stories on these social networks provides them with a much bigger readership via recommendation filters that extend their reach and circulation, along with mechanisms not just to integrate them in their analytics, but also to make money out of their advertising (and eventually, from the advertising that the social network itself will provide them with, in return for a commission).

And in the midst of this revolution, we now learn that the real struggle will be whose news is the most relevant. Everything indicates that there will be a lot of competition to get our attention via alerts that will put stories under our noses on the basis of some algorithm’s estimation that it we’re interested in them. Facebook is working on its real-time news app, which it hopes willrecover some of the ground lost to Twitter. Snapchat, which by now nobody should just dismiss as a teenage instant messaging service with a twist, is working on its own news feed. The idea is clear: these services will work on the basis of user preferences, on what we update, what we search for online, and what our contacts on the social network are up to, neatly summed up by the acronym FOMO: fear of missing out.

This isn’t as easy as it might at first seem: a page’s relevance is based on many, many factors. The same news item that might be interesting today will bore me tomorrow. Something that didn’t interest me might do, once everybody is talking about it. In short, managing and filtering all this information will require complex big data and machine learning systems.

All of which presents newspapers with some serious problems: starting with giving up their masthead to a social network. Regardless of efforts to maintain a publication’s identity through layout, format and characteristic style elements, the brand is inevitably going to be diluted. Whereas before, the unit of analysis was the publication or edition, from now on it will be the news, a flow of information from different sources that the social networks will put under our noses based on a range of criteria (our previous preferences, those of our friends, etc.).

The danger here is that these social networks effectively start editorializing and decide just what kind of news I should be reading. Every publication has its own editorial line, and we know this when we decide to read it. But when the masthead is no longer there, it can be harder to recognize bias: in the longer term, a social network could end up a forum to express certain views that could have an impact, for example, on an election.

At the same time, and independently of these kinds of maneuvers, are our own biases: the so-called “bubble” described by Eli Pariser in his book “The Filter Bubble”, and neatly explained in this Duck Duck Go diagram, leads us to segment the internet so as to be able to digest information based on our tastes and beliefs, ignoring anything that doesn’t fit into our scheme of things, and thus steadily enclosing us in a bubble of our own making.

Whatever the effect of change, what seems clear is that technology will bring it, habit push us toward it, and that it will have a huge impact on how we learn about what is going on in the world and relate to our environment. As far as the social networks are concerned, this change is heaven-sent, putting them at the center of things, and cementing our dependence on them. And of course, as with all change, there will be winners and losers.

(En espa?ol, aquí)