Prepare yourself. In an effort to be true to its copycat nature, Facebook is about to go Tiktok on us. Okay, I can hear the collective eye roll even across the interwebs. Big, hairy deal you say? I’ll tell you why it’s a big, hairy deal. A recent study done by the ever-boring Pew Research Center says 36% of Americans “regularly” go to Facebook for news and 53% of us “often” or “sometimes” rely on social media for news. (Of course, I can’t be expected to read this study or do anything more than glean the headline shock value.) [insert image of me being shocked]
Admit it, some of you are on Facebook right now. You’re trying to corroborate the Pew study, aren’t you? Give it up. You know Facebook doesn’t corroborate anything! It’s time for the unvarnished truth. So pucker up and get ready for some bitter medicine. You know, the kind that comes from an unlabeled brown bottle and was fermented by your great Aunt using a mushroom that grows only in the dung of the endangered South American tapir.
First, let’s deal with how news arrives on Facebook. Then we will deal with how it will perpetuate moving forward. It all starts with my email. I prattle on about something like fermented medicine made from the mushrooms of tapir pooh. A Russian troll farm picks up on the divisive nature of this grade A bullplop. With a few formulaic flourishes, the tapir pooh story becomes a rant about animal rights activists bedeviling the American beef industry by lacing rancid tapir meat into the feed of Brazilian cattle.
To be balanced, an additional story is released about Venezuelan ranchers hunting the tapir to extinction after rumors spread that the animal’s liver could be squeezed to harvest a psychedelic oil currently fetching $7,000 USD an ounce on the black market. These stories are then released into the Facebook landscape via thousands of fake accounts created and held by the employees of the aforementioned Russian troll farm.
In the past, these fake stories (stemming from my emails) would next require hundreds of fake Facebook users (from the same troll farm) to like and comment on them in order to trigger the algorithm into dropping them into your feed (or one of your friend’s feeds). As we all know from the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, it doesn’t take long for one of your friend’s friends who befriended one of the fake Russian troll accounts to click on and then comment/share one of the phony stories, thus eventually landing it in your stream. Still with me? Of course you are.
The secret sauce for Facebook over the last several years has been based on “engagement” by those already in your friends circle. Getting likes and specifically comments has been the key factor for helping the algorithm discover “quality content” which Facebook has then promoted to you via your “friends” (linked accounts on the platform). Of course, we all know the result was to simply proliferate the most outrageous content within your social network. (Enragement is engagement!)
Enter Tiktok stage left.
Tiktok makes no pretense of online friends or social community. No, no. Think bigger. Why limit the content you can readily access to the stuff your friends and family have engaged with? Instead, Tiktok extends its machine learning tentacles deep into your soul and feeds you more of the content you are most afraid to admit you want. And once you’ve tasted it…there’s no going back. Mwahahaha.
Anywho, what does this algorithmic change to Facebook mean for you and me? Well, it may be too early to tell. But my guess is that the psychedelic tapir oil story (not to mention the dastardly attack on Big Beef) will no longer need social proof to reach your stream in the coming months. All it will take is one click on some clickbait article or a “like” on a meme that’s nothing more than lipstick on a pig and Facebook’s new and improved algorithm will denote your specific kind of sucker and inundate you with more of the same. In other words, the “news” half of us go to Facebook for is about to get even newsier. Oh yeah.
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