Twitter to Go the Way of Facebook?

Disatrous idea.

Yesterday, as people panicked about Twitter’s plan to present tweets to users using algorithmic calculations of what that person might like, I wrote this:

What if humans started to experience time as an algorithm of the popular rather than lived narratively ordered experience?

Especially since I work from home and in flyover country, Twitter is very much a lived conversation for me. And if Twitter alters the way it appears to me — basically choosing who it thinks I want to talk to rather than what the serendipity of the unique collection of people I follow presents in time-ordered fashion — it will be fairly dramatically altering my lived reality.

  Empty Wheel

Yeah. That is just crap. It may be my biggest beef about Facebook. In fact, just the other day, after seeing for the umpteenth time Facebook's notification that I could have MORE stories if I had more friends, I wrote this:



Maybe there is an alien conspiracy to get us all to come unstuck in time. Or to wake up and see that in our waking time we're actually dreaming.

Or to create that...

So thought of as its almost most dystopian, Twitter wants to take the serendipitous global conversation we’ve been having and instead replace it with a living dream world chosen for us algorithmically.

But let me go one step more dystopian. As I noted yesterday, Google recently told the British Parliament that it is testing ways to show “positive” ad words and YouTubes when people look for hateful, potentially terrorist speech. Google’s announcement follows an earlier one from Facebook, stating it would do the same.

In other words, since the early January meeting in Silicon Valley, two of the big tech companies announced plans to rejigger their algorithms selectively for users the algos identify as expressing an interest in terrorism. For those interested in terrorism, Google and Facebook will create a waking dreamworld.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.