The Black Box Dilemma

Image from Forbes Magazine (What To Expect From A Pre-Interview Coding Challenge, 2017)

    Have you ever been scrolling on Facebook wondering why you haven’t seen a post from one of your close friends in a while to then pull up their profile and see that they post almost every day? Have you ever wondered why one of your posts only gets 5 likes on Monday but 50 likes on Friday? Once on vacation in New York City, me and my sister posted photos of our trip almost 10 minutes apart but she received far more interaction on her post than I did. This is due to the black box algorithm that different social media platforms use to decide what posts each user should be seeing. This algorithm used in social media is being noticed more frequently each day by its users. The algorithm “determines what is displayed to you: a process or a set of rules that sorts through the possible posts and displays them in a particular way to you” (Lawrence, 2022, p. 82). 

     Most users, like myself, prefer seeing their social media feed in chronological order as it was a few years ago. The algorithm receives information based on how we interact with other users, advertisements, groups, and pages to construct our personalized social media feed. The personalization is flawed though. It knows what we search, what posts made us do a double take, how we react to things and it eventually persuades our actions to always want more. It is the reason people refer to social media as addicting. The Social Dilemma on Netflix goes into extensive detail about how platforms are manipulating their users (Orlowski, 2020).  

Illustration of the Black Box Algorithm (Griva, 2022).

    The term black box makes note of the fact that users can’t see or understand how the algorithm works when it is given an input and produces an output (Lawrence, 2022, p. 81). So because we as users cannot grasp how the algorithm works, we are left in frustration of how our feed is displayed and always wanting to go back for more. The capability that social media companies have to put whatever they desire on our screens can also be dangerous and occasionally biased. The way information is arranged can make you think that a certain piece of information is more important than another piece of information (Lawrence, 2022, p. 82). This strategy used by social media companies will help them achieve their most important goal, taking your money.

   So how can this social platform puzzle be solved? Evidently, there are ways to reset or reboot your algorithm which can only solve the problem temporarily but how does that support the big picture? Is there a way to stop these platforms from using the black box algorithm? Is the issue large enough that it affects people's lives and therefore they will act on it? As long as the corporate billionaires have a say in it, I don’t think the black box algorithm is going anywhere any time soon.

• Haley Stone

References

Griva, A. (2022, January 5). To “Black Box” or not to “Black Box”? - Cois Coiribe. Cois Coiribe. Retrieved January 24, 2024, from

https://impact.universityofgalway.ie/articles/to-black-box-or-not-to-black-box/

Lawrence, D. (2022). Digital Writing: A Guide to Writing for Social Media and the Web. Broadview Press. Retrieved Jan 25, 2024.

Orlowski, J. (Director). (2020). The Social Dilemma [Film]. https://www.netflix.com/watch/81254224?trackId=14277281&tctx=-97%2C-97%2C%2C%2C%2C%2C%2C%2C%2CVideo%3A81254224%2CdetailsPagePlayButton. Retrieved Jan 25, 2024.

What To Expect From A Pre-Interview Coding Challenge. (2017, November 9). Forbes. Retrieved January 26, 2024, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/11/07/what-to-expect-from-a-pre-interview-coding-challenge/?sh=7db2d758115a. Retrieved Jan 25, 2024.