"The Algorithm" Does Not Care About You
Everyone knows that "The Algorithm" is responsible for our timelines, but how does it affect our culture, politics, and daily lives?
Oona Milliken
I’ve started chalking up various problems in my life to “the algorithm” in the same way that I imagined superstitious peasants in the Middle Ages used folkloric trolls and demons to explain their woes and tribulations. Recently I had a particularly nasty spell of anxiety that I attributed to the fact that my For You page had been showing me a lot of toxic and mean-spirited talking head interpersonal relationship videos. I’ve also had phases where I’m certain that my Twitter is showing me accounts of beautiful and alluring women to make me insecure, or my Instagram is displaying clothing I can’t afford to spite me. Oftentimes, I will personify the algorithm and claim that it has some sort of feeling about me, I can piss it off, or it might be in a good mood one day because it’s showing me content I genuinely like. In my mind, the algorithm is the culprit, acting as a quasi-spiritual force that dictates my life in a forceful but ultimately intangible way, like gravity or the wind. But that presumption is wrong. In reality, the algorithm is a highly successful equation that is dead-set on prioritizing profit.
I’m not the only one who uses language like this. I’ve seen and heard comments from people, both online and offline, about a vague capital “A” Algorithm controlling their moods, behaviors and opinions. It has edged into a similarly shapeless and meaningless noun category in which words like “government” and “society” also float around. None of us understand what those words represent or mean anymore, let alone what the “algorithm” actually is. There has been plenty of coverage of social media influencing elections, channeling young people, especially disillusioned young men, into extremism, or aiding in the creation of powerful grass-roots coalitions like Black Lives Matter or movements such as the 2011 Arab Spring. But what about the sludge and slurry of mundanity we wade through online daily? We can no longer be in the dark about how the algorithm works on a regular day-to-day basis. The Internet is, as culture writer Kyle Chayka is quoted in Emily Sundberg’s latest essay, “after all, where we all live.”
As stated, the average social media user uses the phrase “the algorithm” to colloquially explain and allude to how social media conglomerates like Instagram, Tik Tok and Twitter decide what to show us. According to the Internet Justice Society, the algorithm is defined as a “technical means of sorting posts based on relevancy instead of publish time, in order to prioritize which content a user sees first according to the likelihood that they will actually engage with such content.” In researching this article, I came across terms like Naive Banes, Decision Trees, Clustering and K-Means, all set out to explain the nuances and distinctions of these algorithms, which, if you are like me, will mean nothing to you.
In relatively non-technical language, an algorithm for a social media platform functions in that a math equation assigns different weighted classifications and categories to the content on that platform based on the input you give it (that includes your demographic particularities), which shapes the information you view. So the algorithm from the platform of your choosing beeps and blops and bloops and might subsequently shove your face into videos of some hot guy chopping vegetables whilst giving dating advice or a Substack article about how to practice mindfulness as a Google employee — whatever form of pixels that will keep your thumb scrolling.
All of this would be trite if not for the fact that these mathematical equations are what manipulates the deluge of information being sent to your brain for hours and hours on end each day. The user has as little control over this stream of information as a lab rat might have in choosing a carrot over a cucumber when presented with lunch: the choice is illusionary because the options have already been predetermined.
In Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky argue that: “The public is not sovereign over the media – the owners and managers, seeking ads, decide what is to be offered, and the public must choose among these. People watch and read in good part based on what is readily available and intensively promoted.” Though these words were written in 1988, long before Herman and Chomsky could predict the horrifying media maelstrom of the 2010s and 2020s, they still hold true in the contemporary era. The user is not sovereign over the content that they’re being shown every day, though it might feel like they do because they have a few choices over how they navigate the infrastructure of information that they are using.
This lack of agency stems from the primary concern of social media companies: their shareholders. As Sarah Oates writes in her essay The Easy Weaponization of Social Media: Why Profit has Trumped Security for U.S. Companies, neither your brain nor your well-being is a social media company's primary concern: “The real problem is that the users are not the financial priority of Facebook or almost any social media site. Rather, the advertisers are the platform's key customers.” Oates clearly delineates how the profit model of social media companies shapes the interface and structure of the platforms themselves, as large corporations such as Twitter or Instagram are beholden to the companies that pay their bills, not their users.
This is why it’s in the algorithm's best interest to keep your attention so that your mind can soak up ads until your mental space is saturated with as many purchasing opportunities as possible. Here, you splutter, “But most of the content on my feed is jokes and music recommendations or random crap from smaller creators, I don’t even pay attention to the ads!” But you do, you must because social media companies are making gargantuan amounts of money off of you. According to Insider Intelligence, digital ad spending “topped $600 billion” in 2022. I was underplaying the number of ads I was shown on social media myself until I pulled out my phone as I was writing this and saw H&M and Oreo on my Tik Tok, Apple TV on my Twitter, and Wendy’s on my Instagram within the first minute of scrolling, proof that I’ve grown so accustomed to ads in my virtual world that I’ve grown blind to its presence.
Recently, Apple, one of Twitter’s biggest ad revenue contributors, spent $100 million on advertising on that platform alone, a significant profit source for a company that makes 90% of its profit from advertisers. Amazon, Tik Tok’s biggest source of ad money, has set up a rewards program for users to exchange their content for money or gifts. You might also know about the #AmazonFinds on Tik Tok, which has almost 50 billion views and displays neat rows of ready-to-buy content courtesy of everyone’s favorite spaceman Jeff Bezos. HBO, one of the biggest spenders at Tik Tok, even gets free advertisements in the form of masterfully edited Kendall Roy babygirl fancams or The Sopranos clips that generate hundreds of “Bro thought he could drop the hardest Tony Soprano edit of all time and we wouldn’t notice,” comments. It’s in social media companies' best interest to use the algorithm to prioritize the shareholders of these organizations because that’s ultimately how they stay afloat. The more time the user spends online, which for young people is averaging around five hours of their time awake, the more they effectively can consume. Worst of all, unlike other industries, there are almost no regulations or rules on the industry.
There aren’t many laws governing social media in the United States (though the European Union has made strides in regulating tech companies), but Section § 230 is the most significant. Section § 230, passed in 1996 via the Communications Decency Act, protects social media companies from being prosecuted for the content that the users post on their platforms. Originally designed to protect free speech, the law states that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." (47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1)). This law, of course, stirred debate during the U.S. 2016 and 2020 elections as the public realized that Facebook and other sites could inadvertently and purposefully influence election results by prioritizing certain content without being amenable to their platforms. However, even this conversation circumvents the core issue that is facing the virtual world: it is not so much that social media companies should be held liable for what you or I can say online, but that there has been almost no hindrance in the efforts of social media companies to turn users into a commodity. We rely on the services of the Internet for our daily lives just as we rely on the streets we walk on or the water we drink. However, instead of our tax dollars paying for this service, Disney and Amazon (etc. etc. etc.) are footing the bill and banking on algorithms to prioritize their companies to gain back their investment.
Media theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “The medium is the message,” in his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man to illustrate the way that the medium of content, say a movie versus a book or a speech, is more influential in shaping the content user's absorption of the material than the actual content itself. In this case, the medium users post to is intertwined with the capitalist free market: it cannot exist with the current profit model propped up by ad revenue. We have long passed the era of the Internet, where users are discussing ideas on neutral platforms designed purely to discourse. Blogs, chat forums, and even the earlier forms of Reddit and Twitter were all rightfully protected by Section § 230 as they performed the basic service of displaying people’s original content for others to interact with. However, an act passed in the 90s is grossly insufficient to regulate the modes that enable the functioning of our current online spaces. Now, the medium has a mind of its own, a unique character and flavor that is separate from user-generated content. Users must understand that the entertainment they consume is contorted by the medium through which they consume it.
At some level, the user, and you, as the reader, know this. The conversation around the time suck of social media is not new, and most people know that the platforms they use are optimized to get them to spend more time online. However, I want to clarify some of the mysteries around the algorithm. The algorithm is not mad at you — it’s not mystical, it’s not some otherworldly unexplainable force, it’s an equation manipulating you in the way it was designed to by the people that created it. To it, you are nothing more than a statistical point in a massive whirl of data, money, and math that you choose to get sucked into.
I use the word “choose” with reluctance because, as I mentioned, the Internet has graduated beyond the point of something people can opt in and out of; it’s an essential service that we rely on to perform our jobs, build community, to stay informed. To re-use Chayka’s words, our lives are now shaped by the Internet and social media. Sure, you can go offline, but a handful of people rejecting a virtual presence would be useless as digital platforms are so enmeshed into our power structures and the capitalist mode of production that an attempt to reform or deconstruct it would be like dismantling the Catholic Church, a branch of government or a company like Coca-Cola. In a recent conversation between the brilliant writer P.E Moskowitz’ and similarly accomplished journalist/author, Malcolm Harris, Moskovitz compares social media companies to factories during the Industrial Revolution and rejects the possibility of banning them by pointing out that “you can’t just ban something that is integral to the functioning of capitalism.” Unfortunately, this leaves the user in a particularly helpless and unfortunate gray area where one is almost forced to use the Internet, but only through the medium of social media companies like Twitter, Facebook and Tik Tok.
It might be this powerlessness that prompts us to personify the algorithms that dictate our virtual lives to exert a semblance of control over our web-based spaces. Maybe we talk about “training” our algorithms to show us certain memes, less harmful content, or educational videos (like this Dude-Bro podcaster who boasts that he maximizes his time on Tik Tok by coaching the algorithm to do his bidding) to hide the fact we have little to no agency over what we consume day-in and day-out. Yes, you can use your thumb powers to make your Twitter show you anime memes, your Tik Tok display artfully curated design content, or Youtube present you niche indie music videos, but it doesn’t matter. Ultimately, advertisers have the final say—“The Algorithm” is functioning exactly as intended.
Works Cited:
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