Typical people and the networks in which they inhabit
When the built-in counter of the time spent on applications appeared in Android, I first of all paid attention to social networks: Instagram, VKontakte, Facebook and Telegram. It turned out that in a week I spend about 10 hours there. “Not critical numbers,” I thought, but their name, “social networks,” they fully justify. This is something that catches, holds and sometimes can even hurt. And, as befits the networks, there is the part that lies somewhere closer to the muddy bottom, and where it is not at all obvious what could go wrong in the case of extraordinary events.
The longer we use social networks, the more information they have about us. Recently, I was interested in the PyLadies girls programmers movement, so now the instagram with regular constancy offers me posts about the fate of various girls in IT. And this is not bad, as long as the recommendations of social networks can be ignored, as annoying noise. Gillian Brockel, a Washington Post full-time journalist, was pregnant and happily laid out her photos with the appropriate hashtags, even searched for products for newborns several times. Unfortunately, she lost the child in the womb: he was stillborn, only social networks continued to recommend her baby products and various interest groups. This is despite the fact that Gillian was looking for and answers to the questions: “why the child does not move”, “problems with pregnancy”, and all the messages of her friends were simply buried in words of support and sad emoticons. Algorithms of social networks often solve many problems one-sidedly. They are sharpened by the average content life of a well-fed person, and the particular cases of individuals do not interest anyone.
Andrey Nesterov, User Acquisition Manager in Wrike
Facebook in January 2018 announced a change in the recommendation system. Now, the user should have appeared in the feed not just the most popular posts among his friends, but also popular and relevant entries that do not contain dubious news, scenes of violence and still have to do with the user and his place of residence. True, this also has problems. Analytical Bureau NewsWhip watched how information is spread on Facebook. The results were as follows: in 2018, the most popular post was a report about an unidentified criminal in the state of Texas. Even if you live in sunny California or a little less sunny Alaska, the likelihood that you will see news about a criminal from Texas is very high, although you have nothing to do with Texas. Of course, you can find a benefit in this - all of a sudden you are going to move there, and such information will not be superfluous. The second leader was fake news about the strange link between the death penalty in New York State and abortion. Fake news has spread across all Facebook feeds. Even those who lived far beyond the state of New York had to read about death and violence. There is nothing unexpected in this. Victor Pelevin in the novel “SNUFF” generally made violence and his public broadcasting a leitmotif of the work. Let it all be a satire, but because of the imperfection of the algorithms, once we have already encountered this in reality. In March 2019, a terrorist in New Zealand managed to conduct a live broadcast of his crime to Facebook for 29 minutes. These algorithms, which will recommend goods for the dead children to you, could not recognize for 29 minutes that people were being killed on the live video. Neither by the video sequence, nor by the comments to the broadcast, nor by repost. The problem is that the algorithm reads the behavior of the “average” Facebook user, who does not launch live broadcasts with massacres and weapons. The social network itself stated that the first request from users about the unacceptability of content came 29 minutes after the start of the broadcast. Unfortunately, this is still the only way to report a problem. After this incident, Facebook plans to hire even more content moderators, but for more than 1.5 billion active users of the social network, it’s hard to imagine the number of people who could be watched regularly.
Not only Facebook decides what to show you and what doesn't. Tinder, a social network for dating, also decided to modify its algorithm, and now she knows better who you should see in the recommendations. At the beginning of his journey, Tinder worked on the Elo algorithm, which is familiar to chess players - he calculates your rating. In a nutshell, it sounds like this: your rating is calculated based on the number of likes of other people and their rating. The higher the rating of the like, the greater the weight of his like. The updated algorithm is called Glicko, and, first of all, evaluates the user's activity. If you do not open Tinder, then your rating will fall. Also, the changes affected the behavior with dislikes - these people are pulling behind them a whole chain of users that Tinder will no longer show you. As a result, the sample is narrowed, but it seems that it is not narrowed from the edge where you are not interested people, but evenly, which means that you have to choose from the average set of more or less suitable partners for you.
A little bit further, the non-public, but already notorious social network of Yandex “Aura” has gone. Everything in it is built on a system of recommendations and interests. I flicked the post to the right - put a Like, left - passed by. During registration, you are required to provide your real data and attach a real photo of your face in good quality. And indicate a list of interests, of course. The aura will pick you friends, interesting notes, and even write to some of the new, so far strangers, and offer to meet. It seems that it was an incorrectly working function in the early version, which will not behave in the public version either, otherwise it can somehow be awkward.
VKontakte is also not far behind in the development of information distribution algorithms, and in the summer of 2018 the network introduced the Nemesis system, which should help protect the copyright to the content. That is, a greater number of likes and reposts should receive the original post, and not its numerous copies. And those who give out someone else's content for their own, nemesis will be punished. With such a name can be punished, and not only for copies of posts. But then Nemesis will take away the bread of another system.
This whole story with a lot of time spent on social networks that form for you (un) a unique set of information, has a more tangible impact on the real, non-digital world. Thanks to Facebook and other giants in the USA, more than 1,800 prints have been closed since 2014, and now almost every third American lives in almost news isolation, because the typical elderly man, a la Clint Eastwood, hardly uses an iPhone. Now a social network that accidentally buried small local publications, both good and bad, is trying to resurrect them under its wing - in January 2019, the network launched the Facebook Journalism Project . True, Facebook is as far from the media as crazy from reality, and apart from skepticism, their initiative does not cause anything. A noble impulse is indisputable, but it will be clear what these good intentions will result only after considerable time, according to reviews from where local news is already passed from word of mouth. In Russia in 2017, slightly more than 3,000 media outlets were registered , and more than 6,000 were closed. A similar trend, I myself took the Metro newspaper, in which you can read local news, about 8 years ago. Now I read all the news in VKontakte or Telegram. But I was lucky, I have access to the network 24/7, and I want to believe that I choose high-quality sources of information. And when this accessibility comes to the most remote corners of our Motherland, the bias in favor of social networks will increase. VKontakte or Facebook didn’t set themselves the goal of destroying small media, but remember that trainings on marketing strategies in social networks are still popular, and that a solid piece of advertising pie will undoubtedly go to social networks. Many local media are doomed if they cannot adapt.
Where the giant cannot crush, the state machine will come to the rescue. The US government is actively discussing the bill on which all your data in social networks can be official reasons for approving or refusing any services or benefits. Human rights activists fear that this may turn into a farce: if a disabled person posts a photo with a basketball, then he may not be a disabled person at all, and he can be deprived of benefits. Or to increase the size of insurance premiums, if a person was photographed only once in a hang-glider flight with an instructor. Against this background, the news about the fact that MySpace has lost all the photos and videos of some users over the past 12 years seems not sad, but, on the contrary, joyful. The reason is simple: the data migrated from one server to another, and they were lost. Irrevocably. MySpace has already apologized for the inconvenience. In our homeland, people are actively discussing how to punish for defamatory information, and the criminal case for the repost has become so familiar that the cooperation of some social networks with law enforcement agencies is no longer a whisper, but loud speeches supported by evidence.
Vkontakte has more than 41 million users in Russia, Facebook has more than 21 million, Instagram has more than 16 million. It is clear that these sets overlap, and even if we take regular visitors to VKontakte, then one third of the population of Russia will gain strength, while there are 169 million active users in the US, which is just over half of the population. Oh yeah, and most of the participants in social networks in Russia live in St. Petersburg and Moscow. The social networking market in Russia is open for growth, VKontakte and Facebook audiences are increasing every year, which means that the amount of content and the ability to deliver it will grow. Now, inquiries about news about social networks in Russia, the first few lines in the issuance are still occupied by community promotion services, SMM trainings and other marketing tools. This news is interspersed with rare MIA reports. So far, social networks have not become a source of information and entertainment for the majority of people living in the country, but this time will definitely come. While Yandex’s algorithms for delivering contextual advertising do not differ from those of Google, and if you use a Yandex account integrated into a search engine, a taxi, food, online store order, then you share absolutely the same information that any person shares for by the ocean. So, problems will have to be solved the same. Simply, access to the Internet so far is not at all. For now.
Everything described above happened in distant overseas countries, and this gives us a small head start - if something does not happen for us, then we can prepare, because the development paths are repeated with great precision. And this is not about the state, not about thousands of moderators, not about censoring. This is about the maximum awareness of their actions in the network, about an adequate assessment of the situation. The same Facebook reported that the first notification about the unacceptability of a live broadcast from New Zealand was received only on the 29th minute. By the time there were at least 200 spectators. Unfortunately, the algorithms of social networks are sharpened to some kind of abstract society, in reality which they want to convince the majority. These algorithms are completely unaddressed for the anomalous behavior of units, and here we ourselves must take appropriate measures - to wind clicks and likes over strange records or not, use anonymizer or not, leave or not the data of our accounts on third-party resources, let them be reliable, report suspicious and inappropriate content or not. This is not a demarche against the use of social networks, no. There are many examples when events lit on Reddit, Habré, Facebook or VKontakte collected tremendous feedback and helped to correct the situation. And scientists are inclined to believe that, in general, the use of social networks does not make us happier or more unhappy. But there is a certain risk of getting into a situation when the network causes immediate damage. And it seems that it is time to treat social networks as an instrument, with its own security rules, an understanding of its limitations and the realization that any actions in them lead to consequences.
Personal incident
The longer we use social networks, the more information they have about us. Recently, I was interested in the PyLadies girls programmers movement, so now the instagram with regular constancy offers me posts about the fate of various girls in IT. And this is not bad, as long as the recommendations of social networks can be ignored, as annoying noise. Gillian Brockel, a Washington Post full-time journalist, was pregnant and happily laid out her photos with the appropriate hashtags, even searched for products for newborns several times. Unfortunately, she lost the child in the womb: he was stillborn, only social networks continued to recommend her baby products and various interest groups. This is despite the fact that Gillian was looking for and answers to the questions: “why the child does not move”, “problems with pregnancy”, and all the messages of her friends were simply buried in words of support and sad emoticons. Algorithms of social networks often solve many problems one-sidedly. They are sharpened by the average content life of a well-fed person, and the particular cases of individuals do not interest anyone.
In general, most of the changes in social network algorithms, in my subjective observation, are dictated by the increase in revenue from paid advertising. After the recent changes in the Facebook algorithms, many of my colleagues have noted an increase in ROI for advertising from this site.
')
Any ad or post labeled “sponsored” has its own ranking system. They differ from site to site, but the essence lies in the quality indicators, which, in fact, speak about how the ad corresponds to the interests, behavior and intentions of the user, how much the ad is relevant to what the user waits after clicking on it and the user experience on vendor page.
From the point of view of paid advertising, the algorithms of Facebook, Google, Twitter and other advertising sites determine which “built-in” audience the user gets. It is difficult to say how accurately the audience name coincides with the actual interests or intentions of users, since in essence it is a “black box”.
Andrey Nesterov, User Acquisition Manager in Wrike
Large scale incident
Facebook in January 2018 announced a change in the recommendation system. Now, the user should have appeared in the feed not just the most popular posts among his friends, but also popular and relevant entries that do not contain dubious news, scenes of violence and still have to do with the user and his place of residence. True, this also has problems. Analytical Bureau NewsWhip watched how information is spread on Facebook. The results were as follows: in 2018, the most popular post was a report about an unidentified criminal in the state of Texas. Even if you live in sunny California or a little less sunny Alaska, the likelihood that you will see news about a criminal from Texas is very high, although you have nothing to do with Texas. Of course, you can find a benefit in this - all of a sudden you are going to move there, and such information will not be superfluous. The second leader was fake news about the strange link between the death penalty in New York State and abortion. Fake news has spread across all Facebook feeds. Even those who lived far beyond the state of New York had to read about death and violence. There is nothing unexpected in this. Victor Pelevin in the novel “SNUFF” generally made violence and his public broadcasting a leitmotif of the work. Let it all be a satire, but because of the imperfection of the algorithms, once we have already encountered this in reality. In March 2019, a terrorist in New Zealand managed to conduct a live broadcast of his crime to Facebook for 29 minutes. These algorithms, which will recommend goods for the dead children to you, could not recognize for 29 minutes that people were being killed on the live video. Neither by the video sequence, nor by the comments to the broadcast, nor by repost. The problem is that the algorithm reads the behavior of the “average” Facebook user, who does not launch live broadcasts with massacres and weapons. The social network itself stated that the first request from users about the unacceptability of content came 29 minutes after the start of the broadcast. Unfortunately, this is still the only way to report a problem. After this incident, Facebook plans to hire even more content moderators, but for more than 1.5 billion active users of the social network, it’s hard to imagine the number of people who could be watched regularly.
Cutting corners
Not only Facebook decides what to show you and what doesn't. Tinder, a social network for dating, also decided to modify its algorithm, and now she knows better who you should see in the recommendations. At the beginning of his journey, Tinder worked on the Elo algorithm, which is familiar to chess players - he calculates your rating. In a nutshell, it sounds like this: your rating is calculated based on the number of likes of other people and their rating. The higher the rating of the like, the greater the weight of his like. The updated algorithm is called Glicko, and, first of all, evaluates the user's activity. If you do not open Tinder, then your rating will fall. Also, the changes affected the behavior with dislikes - these people are pulling behind them a whole chain of users that Tinder will no longer show you. As a result, the sample is narrowed, but it seems that it is not narrowed from the edge where you are not interested people, but evenly, which means that you have to choose from the average set of more or less suitable partners for you.
A little bit further, the non-public, but already notorious social network of Yandex “Aura” has gone. Everything in it is built on a system of recommendations and interests. I flicked the post to the right - put a Like, left - passed by. During registration, you are required to provide your real data and attach a real photo of your face in good quality. And indicate a list of interests, of course. The aura will pick you friends, interesting notes, and even write to some of the new, so far strangers, and offer to meet. It seems that it was an incorrectly working function in the early version, which will not behave in the public version either, otherwise it can somehow be awkward.
VKontakte is also not far behind in the development of information distribution algorithms, and in the summer of 2018 the network introduced the Nemesis system, which should help protect the copyright to the content. That is, a greater number of likes and reposts should receive the original post, and not its numerous copies. And those who give out someone else's content for their own, nemesis will be punished. With such a name can be punished, and not only for copies of posts. But then Nemesis will take away the bread of another system.
Death of local media
This whole story with a lot of time spent on social networks that form for you (un) a unique set of information, has a more tangible impact on the real, non-digital world. Thanks to Facebook and other giants in the USA, more than 1,800 prints have been closed since 2014, and now almost every third American lives in almost news isolation, because the typical elderly man, a la Clint Eastwood, hardly uses an iPhone. Now a social network that accidentally buried small local publications, both good and bad, is trying to resurrect them under its wing - in January 2019, the network launched the Facebook Journalism Project . True, Facebook is as far from the media as crazy from reality, and apart from skepticism, their initiative does not cause anything. A noble impulse is indisputable, but it will be clear what these good intentions will result only after considerable time, according to reviews from where local news is already passed from word of mouth. In Russia in 2017, slightly more than 3,000 media outlets were registered , and more than 6,000 were closed. A similar trend, I myself took the Metro newspaper, in which you can read local news, about 8 years ago. Now I read all the news in VKontakte or Telegram. But I was lucky, I have access to the network 24/7, and I want to believe that I choose high-quality sources of information. And when this accessibility comes to the most remote corners of our Motherland, the bias in favor of social networks will increase. VKontakte or Facebook didn’t set themselves the goal of destroying small media, but remember that trainings on marketing strategies in social networks are still popular, and that a solid piece of advertising pie will undoubtedly go to social networks. Many local media are doomed if they cannot adapt.
Synthesis with the device
Where the giant cannot crush, the state machine will come to the rescue. The US government is actively discussing the bill on which all your data in social networks can be official reasons for approving or refusing any services or benefits. Human rights activists fear that this may turn into a farce: if a disabled person posts a photo with a basketball, then he may not be a disabled person at all, and he can be deprived of benefits. Or to increase the size of insurance premiums, if a person was photographed only once in a hang-glider flight with an instructor. Against this background, the news about the fact that MySpace has lost all the photos and videos of some users over the past 12 years seems not sad, but, on the contrary, joyful. The reason is simple: the data migrated from one server to another, and they were lost. Irrevocably. MySpace has already apologized for the inconvenience. In our homeland, people are actively discussing how to punish for defamatory information, and the criminal case for the repost has become so familiar that the cooperation of some social networks with law enforcement agencies is no longer a whisper, but loud speeches supported by evidence.
Meanwhile
Vkontakte has more than 41 million users in Russia, Facebook has more than 21 million, Instagram has more than 16 million. It is clear that these sets overlap, and even if we take regular visitors to VKontakte, then one third of the population of Russia will gain strength, while there are 169 million active users in the US, which is just over half of the population. Oh yeah, and most of the participants in social networks in Russia live in St. Petersburg and Moscow. The social networking market in Russia is open for growth, VKontakte and Facebook audiences are increasing every year, which means that the amount of content and the ability to deliver it will grow. Now, inquiries about news about social networks in Russia, the first few lines in the issuance are still occupied by community promotion services, SMM trainings and other marketing tools. This news is interspersed with rare MIA reports. So far, social networks have not become a source of information and entertainment for the majority of people living in the country, but this time will definitely come. While Yandex’s algorithms for delivering contextual advertising do not differ from those of Google, and if you use a Yandex account integrated into a search engine, a taxi, food, online store order, then you share absolutely the same information that any person shares for by the ocean. So, problems will have to be solved the same. Simply, access to the Internet so far is not at all. For now.
Everything described above happened in distant overseas countries, and this gives us a small head start - if something does not happen for us, then we can prepare, because the development paths are repeated with great precision. And this is not about the state, not about thousands of moderators, not about censoring. This is about the maximum awareness of their actions in the network, about an adequate assessment of the situation. The same Facebook reported that the first notification about the unacceptability of a live broadcast from New Zealand was received only on the 29th minute. By the time there were at least 200 spectators. Unfortunately, the algorithms of social networks are sharpened to some kind of abstract society, in reality which they want to convince the majority. These algorithms are completely unaddressed for the anomalous behavior of units, and here we ourselves must take appropriate measures - to wind clicks and likes over strange records or not, use anonymizer or not, leave or not the data of our accounts on third-party resources, let them be reliable, report suspicious and inappropriate content or not. This is not a demarche against the use of social networks, no. There are many examples when events lit on Reddit, Habré, Facebook or VKontakte collected tremendous feedback and helped to correct the situation. And scientists are inclined to believe that, in general, the use of social networks does not make us happier or more unhappy. But there is a certain risk of getting into a situation when the network causes immediate damage. And it seems that it is time to treat social networks as an instrument, with its own security rules, an understanding of its limitations and the realization that any actions in them lead to consequences.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/458894/
All Articles