Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Tuesday, February 02, 2016

Facebook Is Changing Your News Feed In A Subtle But Important Way

Facebook is introducing a new way to track what you do on your News Feed.

The social network will now weigh two different factors when deciding what to show you, the company announced in a blog post Monday.

"News Feed will begin to look at both the probability that you would want to see the story at the top of your feed and the probability that you will like, comment on, click or share a story," Facebook engineers Cheng Zhang and Si Chen wrote.

In other words, Facebook will try to use what it knows about you to show you things you want to see and respond to. It's not clear exactly how this will work, and a spokeswoman for Facebook did not reply to requests for comment.

But it's no secret that the company is constantly tweaking the algorithms behind the information you see. Your News Feed is shaped by the content you tap and the people you interact with, which theoretically means you don't see junk posts you're uninterested in.

Even outside of News Feed, Facebook is paying closer attention to your interactions than you might realize. For example, a couple of weeks ago it suggested that I search for my fiancee's little sister "licking batter" because a related post was popular and I'd interacted with her updates before. Weird!

So, take this as your regular reminder that every little "like" and emoji you post are actually data points in the big, complicated web that is your life on social media.

Original Article
Source: huffingtonpost.com/
Author: Damon Beres

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