Week 10--Final Project- How social media algorithms influence the spread of culture and information in the digital society.

Have you ever been scrolling on social media and noticed the same types of videos funneling in on your feed? Or even the same video twice in a row?

Definition: Algorithm (noun)-
“A social media algorithm is a set of rules and computations that determine what content appears in a user's feed and in what order. These algorithms analyze user interactions such as likes, comments, and shares to create a personalized experience, but they can also prioritize engagement-driving content, leading to potential challenges like echo chambers and the spread of misinformation.” 

According to Institute for Internet & the Just Society, "Algorithms in social media platforms can be defined as technical means of sorting posts based on relevancy instead of publish time, in order to prioritize which content an user sees first according to the likelihood that they will actually engage with such content." 

in other words, It takes your engagements and video interactions to curate what the rest of your feed will look like, or what your "perfect feed" could be.

For example, the time and/ or pace that you scroll at through social media is how the algorithms provided you recommended videos and a feed it thinks you would like. These algorithms can be written by "coders" who make use of machine learning. “Machine learning” means that the algorithm learns how to carry out tasks under various levels of human oversight. By managing several tasks, such as managing flows of content through active recommendations as well as shadow bans and interaction with information through likes and comments to improve the contents overall discoverability.

In addition to the machine learning task, algorithms rank and filtered information in ways that create incentives and conditions of interaction for content creators and businesses that are similar to markets. This can be both positively or negatively impactful on the society watching, depending if the content being produced is real or created by AI.  

When experimenting with the algorithm and testing its works with my feed, I was surprised by how fast and well this theory actually worked. I noticed my feed changing multiple times a day depending on my interaction being more or less throughout scrolling. I noticed a large amount of the same content throughout the feed the algorithm was creating for me, and the videos as I kept scrolling were becoming more and more similar to the previous one I watched. 

On the "business side" of the algorithms role on social media, the algorithm is crucial for content distribution, visibility, and “strategic planning,”  The algorithms determine and detect which content gets promoted to a wider audience based on performance and engagement & because most social media apps know our age, it helps them decide what content to give to age groups based on popular engagement and what new trends might be occurring. 

In concussion-

The algorithm is both used for business and advertisement as well as just to grab viewers attention to get them hooked into their feed. This comes with benefits for the business side of algorithm, and produces a boosted amount of interaction their company or brand is getting, ultimately leading them to more business and customers. But on the user side, we are essentially losing "control" of our life to these controllers. By constructing the feed that we see and addicting our minds to watching and following it, it a huge concern that studies have with this theory. 

Work Cited

Adisa, Dorcas. “Everything You Need to Know about Social Media Algorithms.” Sprout Social, 30 Oct. 2023, sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-algorithms/.

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Golino, Maria Alessandra. “Algorithms in Social Media Platforms.” Institute for Internet and             the Just"  Society, 24 Apr. 2021, www.internetjustsociety.org/algorithms-in-social-media-platforms.
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