Feeds, Algorithms, and Social Media

Objectives

Explain what a recommendation means
Recognize saturation and hashtag hijacking

Videos

Social Media. Crash Course · Navigating Digital Information #10. Watch on YouTube

The Dark(er) Side of Media. Crash Course · Media Literacy #10. Watch on YouTube

Lesson

A recommended post was chosen for you by a ranking system. That tells you about the system, not about the post’s importance or truth. Virality is replication, not verification.

A flood of alarming items leaves no bandwidth to check any single one. Borrowed attention, such as a hijacked hashtag, says nothing about the new message riding on it.

Terms

Information diet, Narrative

Sources

Check

- That it is the most recent item published on the subject
- A ranking system chose it, not that it is important or true
- That it was verified before the platform distributed it widely
- That most people who saw it agreed with what it said
- Organic corroboration, as unrelated users reached one conclusion
- Hashtag hijacking: borrowing an audience for another message
- A primary-source release timed to the charity drive
- A statistical correction to the original campaign’s claims
- Better understanding through sheer volume of coverage
- Saturation: overload weakens judgment of each claim
- Independent corroboration
- A primary-source briefing on each topic