Who's really to blame for the web's hidden bias?

Facebook has been much in the news recently. You may have followed the story: the tech site Gizmodo quoted unnamed former Facebook contractors who said they routinely suppressed conservative viewpoints in the “trending stories” news feed. This caused many (mainly conservatives, you might expect) to raise the hue and cry about the alleged liberal bias. Facebook has officially denied any such hidden agenda.

Now I could use this blog to question why anyone gets their news from Facebook in the first place, but that would be futile. The fact is they do. According to a 2015 Pew research study, 63% of Facebook users use it to get the news. And 40% of users agree that it is “an important way to get the news.”

Or I could make comparison of liberal and conservative thinking when it comes to suspected biases in the media and society at large. (“Why is it usually the conservatives who see these conspiracies at work?” I might ask – but I won’t!)

I might also reiterate some of what the Wall Street Journal concluded, saying “…using human editors to curate trending topics inevitably introduces biases, both conscious and unconscious.” The Journal (no hidden liberal bias here!) said that in this regard Facebook operated just like any other news room.

But in a larger sense, in my opinion, we’re chasing the wrong bogeyman. Facebook is not to blame; we are. The fact is that we reveal our own prejudices and preferences with every click we make, and the internet is designed to reflect that back to us. As Frank Bruni wrote in the New York Times, in a column called “How Facebook Warps Our Worlds”, the internet is not rigged to give us a conservative or liberal bias, until we rig it that way ourselves. It is, he said “designed to give us more of the same.”

Every time we click like, follow a link, join a page or a group, we are telling the internet what we want, and the internet will give us more just like that. Just look at all the ads you see now, all chosen just for you. Every click you make determines what you’ll see next.

Google does this every time you search. It records the link you clicked on – all the links you’ve ever clicked on – and uses that knowledge to serve up search choices for you next time that more closely match your profile. It gives you what it has calculated you want. That’s part of Google’s secret sauce.

Eli Pariser wrote an eye-opening book in 2011 called the “Filter Bubble”, which described all the ways that the web’s hidden gatekeepers now build a bubble around us, all in the name of customization. We get the web experience just the way we want it, without even asking for it. More and more we’re living in a house of mirrors, in which everything we are is reflected back on us.

(By the way, I highly recommend Pariser’s TED talk about the Filter Bubble. It’s been viewed more than three and half million times and it’s worth nine minutes of your time too.)

So don’t each of us win when our likes and dislikes rule the web experience? I don’t think so. The danger is real that our minds will become increasingly narrowed by reinforcement of our opinions. The web will just continue to prove us right, in whatever we believe, from rigid political dogma, nutty conspiracy theories, prejudices of all kinds – you name it. It can’t be good to be shown only content that agrees with you.

The fact is that we need to have our beliefs challenged by differing viewpoints. And we need to be available when some serendipitous idea or story comes our way. We have to be there to see it.

I used to buy the New York Times every morning and “read” it from first page to last. I didn’t read everything, but at least I looked at it, bumping by chance into all kinds of stories I never would have sought out: cooking, travel, the chess column, whatever. Now, my news consumption is quite different. I subscribe to the Times web site and I only click on what I want to see. No serendipity here folks.

So don’t blame Facebook or some other online source for serving up a biased agenda. Look in the mirror.

Your social network pages need end of life planning too

A recent conversation with friends revolved around the question “what happens to all your social network stuff when you die?” I know the topic sounds grim (although I assure you the conversation wasn’t), but it’s an interesting issue and one that everyone should give some thought to. After all, as Steve Jobs said, death is a destination we all share.

I had looked into this question a few years ago and found that it truly presented problems for relatives when loved ones passed away. Often there was much material online that family members either might not know about, or lacked the means to remove or otherwise archive or care for. Social media sites, in the early days, had no good ways of dealing with it either.

This led to pages of the deceased lingering in a kind of online limbo. I recall an article in the NY Times called “As Facebook Users Die,Ghosts Reach Out” from 2010 that stated “Facebook says it has been grappling with how to handle ghosts in the machine but acknowledges that it has not found a good solution.” That was then.

Having rechecked this issue now, I can assure you that things have gotten a whole lot better. All the sites I checked – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest – had policies in place and much has been written on the subject. Wikipedia even has an article “Death and the Internet” about it. The problem I saw years ago has been solved, and if not perfectly, at least adequately.

There are two ways to address the online presence of a loved one who has passed. Delete his accounts altogether or convert them to a memorial status for a period of time so that friends and relatives can share their grief and celebrate his life. Facebook allows either option, and has a form that must be filled in to report a death; you’ll have to search for it in the help section but it’s there. I think the memorial page is a good idea and I predict it will become the option of choice. As we all use sites like FB to play out a part of our public lives, it makes sense for others to use it to gather and share. These pages should not grow stale from neglect, and neither should they be deleted without ceremony.

Other sites deactivate accounts upon request (Twitter) or after a long period of inactivity (Dropbox). There are also ways to download a copy of the content for you to save, rather than having it ultimately disappear. I found this graphic on lifehacker to be helpful in summarizing the policies of the major sites.

All sites require that the person requesting the change prove in some way that the person has passed on. This is not something that anyone can do as a prank, and every site takes action only when assured the request is legit. Many require a copy of a death certificate, or a link to an obituary online. People, not software, handle these requests on a case by case basis. It’s an extensive responsbility too, since one stat I found stated that over 10,000 Facebook users die every day. (Wow, BTW.)

We should all plan for this eventuality ourselves, just as we prepare wills, end-of-life directives and the rest. As a start, I recommend making a list of ALL your online accounts, with usernames and passwords and leaving it for your executor or spouse. (You can seal it in an envelope if you like.) Although it’s technically wrong for someone else to log in as you, even after death, it’s a head start in getting one’s arms around what will undoubtedly be an unhappy and complicated chore. Untangling all those accounts, including banking and much more, is a daunting task. Don’t make it harder on your loved ones than it has to be.

Lessons from Facebook

Facebook has been in the news a lot lately, under attack for lax privacy policies and what seems like a never ending stream of bugs and mishaps (each of which seem to result in further exposure of private information). What’s not helping FB either is the walking PR disaster named Mark Zuckerberg. Every attempt by Mark to diffuse the privacy controversy gives further evidence that he just doesn’t get it.

“The default is social.” That’s Mark’s mantra when it comes to sharing, but there are plenty who disagree, if you listen to the blogosphere, twitterverse and the tech media, and at least one major study by the Pew Research Center.

You can’t blame Mark and the Facebook crew for encouraging us to share. That would be fine if that was as far as it went. But you CAN blame them for (a) making over-sharing the default through their many privacy settings, and then (b) making the privacy policy and configuration choices so complicated and difficult to manage that many people give up and go with the defaults. Or else don’t know and don’t care.

The New York Times had a great graphic on FB’s bewildering tangle of privacy options: 50 settings and 170 options. In five years their privacy policy has grown from 1,004 words to 5,830. Compare that to the 384 word statement at Flickr (admittedly one of the shortest cited by the Times).

Zuckerberg has announced that FB will be simplifying how its users will manage their privacy on the site, but given their history we’ll have to watch closely to see how this plays out. Given the new Open Graph API and the Like button (just two examples), there are still many ways for us to be enticed into sharing more than we thought we were.

I think this part of the issue highlights one of the unspoken imperatives for technology professionals. To go along with the obvious obligations like making software work as designed, we should acknowledge the need to keep things simple for the user. Software and technology is getting more complex and harder to manage (as well as more hidden and more pervasive – but that’s another post!). The same capabilities and ever increasing processing power, which give us the ability to make systems feature-rich (or bloated), also give us the ability to make things more customizable, more interactive, more transparent and more responsive to the user. And that doesn’t mean a bunch of default settings that reflect someone else’s choices.