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.

Beware the 5-star review

If you always suspected that a lot of those on-line product reviews sounded a little phony – here’s some more vindication for your suspicions. The New York Attorney General has just successfully settled a whole bunch of charges against 19 companies that were paying for doctored and fabricated user reviews on websites like Google, Yelp and Yahoo. Although the punishments total only a paltry $350,000, the case is the latest to bring to light the practice that everyone has suspected, and which many believe is growing worse rapidly.

This was no isolated case of an employee or business owner faking a review; it was systematic fraud that violated truth in advertising laws and involved use of several shadowy companies that are paid for the practice. Promising to improve one’s brand or at least outnumber the (presumably legitimate) negative reviews, these companies employ digital sweatshops in Eastern Europe, Bangladesh and the Philippines to churn out glowing reviews for products the reviewers have never seen or used.

The companies are called reputation management firms, and their stated purpose is to ensure that you or your business are not unfairly smeared on line. But all too often, they go beyond that into perpetrating outright fraud, presumably to counteract the negative stuff, but also to mislead and fool customers into believing you’re good when you’re not. As an article in the NY Times technology section points out, a phony restaurant review will result in no more than a bad meal; however the New York crackdown uncovered the practice being used by dentists, lawyers and other professionals – areas where the consequences of false advertising can be much more serious.

A Gartner study last year predicted that 15% of all social media ratings and reviews will be bogus by 2014, and I think that number is sure to go higher. Another study by the Harvard Business Review proved that an increase in ratings on Yelp, for example, translated into a significant and measureable increase in revenue. So this is not a trivial matter for businesses;  a Nielsen study last year showed that online ratings were the second most trusted form of advertising, after word of mouth.

The internet was supposed to be liberating. The interactivity of Web 2.0 meant that every man could be his own reviewer, and the people finally had a voice. Instead of the professional reviewer, now all products and services were subject to crowd sourcing – mass customer feedback, published for all to see. From the star ratings on Amazon, one of the earliest forms of user ratings, to dedicated sites like Yelp and variants like Urbanspoon, Angie's List and Citysearch, online ratings are everywhere, and influential. How many times have you checked the reviews on a restaurant or book and made your decision accordingly? I know I have, many times over.

Reactions to the Times article on line were numerous and outspoken. Many felt that the problem was even worse than already reported. Some responders, however, confused the faked reviews with freedom of speech and concluded that there was nothing that can be done to fight the practice. Not true, as the Attorney General’s crackdown – and an increasing number of enforcements around the country – has proved. Advertising is NOT protected by first amendment free speech guarantees, and commercial speech has long been regulated. The attempts to manipulate public opinion through rating sites and social media were clearly a violation of law, and the companies investigated by the AG all settled without going to trial. “Businesses have a moral and legal responsibility to present things as they are,” David Streitfeld, the author of the Times article, wrote in a follow-up. “Otherwise we’re going to be ordering lobster on the menu and we’re going to get hamster.” 

That on-line ratings are being manipulated comes as no surprise then, and I’m sure you’re all nodding with an “I knew it all along” expression. User ratings have become just one more thing on the internet that we can no longer fully trust.

The story about the New York cases was well covered in BusinessWeek, which also described the efforts by Yelp and others to weed out the fakes.

The Global Village is alive – on Twitter and YouTube

I’m watching the incredible and tragic images from Japan on the earthquake and the tsunami that followed. The human devastation, accompanied by physical destruction, infrastructure and economic damage, and the potential environmental impact of a nuclear plant meltdown all combine to make this one of the worst disasters of our time. I know the whole world will respond with emergency relief, but it will be many years before this one is over.

I’m also struck with how much this story has exploded on social media sites, most obviously Twitter and YouTube. In the hours after the disaster, there were 1200 tweets per minute about the disaster (not all of these were from the scene: the whole world was talking). YouTube now has many thousands of videos from Japan, some taken during the quake, many others showing the aftermath.

We just saw how the web played a pivotal role in the unrest in the Middle East. Thousands, perhaps millions of protesters, used Twitter and Facebook to communicate, band together and plan their next steps – first in Tunisia, then Egypt and now Libya. This is still going on. Over two hundred years ago, printing presses in the American colonies fueled a revolution that defied a powerful oppressor. Today, smartphones and web sites are doing exactly the same thing.

These sites are a clearing house for anyone with news to spread or a picture or video to share. They act as always-on sources of information with an immediacy that the news media – no matter how tech-savvy they are or will become – can never match. They are open and accessible by all; there are no filters or gatekeepers here. As we know, this is not a good thing when thoughtful, careful, accurate reporting is required; they won’t compete with traditional news sources when it comes to reasoned consideration of a complex story. But for cases like this, where immediate on-the-scene news is needed, nothing can beat the tools of Web 2.0.

The founding of YouTube in 2005 and Twitter in 2006 are well known stories and can be easily sourced on the web. Suffice it to say that the founders of both did not envision that their creations would be, within just a few years, major forces on the world stage bringing people together for common cause, toppling governments, sharing news and experience worldwide.

These sites also provide something that no news media has ever done – allow anyone, anywhere in the world, to share the emotions of the experience. The revolutionary fervor and hope of those in the Middle East has been astonishing to see. The outpourings of grief and concern for the Japanese people this week has been equally impressive. The highest trending hashtag on Twitter right now: #prayforjapan.

You have to be amazed at the new roles found for tools that seemed to start with a very different purpose. What began as fluffy, inconsequential, almost trivial web sites, has been put to new uses by popular demand. We remember that Twitter started with the question “What are you doing right now?” And who can forget all those skateboard-riding gerbils on YouTube?

I still encounter many who scoff at Twitter and other sites like it: trivial time-sinks with no serious purpose. Perhaps after 2011 these skeptics will have a different viewpoint. We should all find a new respect for the power of these sites that enable mass communication, mass sharing and an almost subversive way for people to communicate without barriers or gatekeepers, official or otherwise.

There has long been talk about the Internet turning us into a global village: it’s times like these that I can believe it.