Social Media’s False Reality: How AI + Behavior Impacts Our Feeds
Social media plays a pivotal role in our society as a ubiquitous source for news in both the public and private spheres. Our friends, our families, and our communities all exist within this online space, but they do not so equally. Algorithms govern the content we see. How do they work?
Algorithms rank our social media posts based on our behaviors.
When we are tired or in a rush, humans tend to behave automatically. Your commute to work is probably second nature. That is, you reflexively know exactly what route to take and spend little to no time making the decision of how to get to work. We behave the same way when we scroll on social media. Just like your commute to work, the likes and comments on posts doesn’t take much contemplation. Our brains behave on autopilot, interacting with our feed almost automatically.
Our automatic nature online tends to cause bias within our feeds as our subconscious biases govern our engagement. While we may prefer a mix of content from both our own and out groups, our automatic nature—especially when rushed or tired—often leads to increased interaction with posts from our own group. This inadvertently prioritizes content from individuals who share similar perspectives and characteristics. The effects of our choices—which don’t always reflect our true preferences—are intensified by algorithms.
Our subconscious biases and rushed decisions ultimately create a false reality.
Curious to learn more about this concept? Check out the Center for Applied AI’s website outlining the project and evaluate your own automaticity with an automaticity quiz.
This article was based on Amanda Y. Agan, Diag Davenport, Jens Ludwig, and Sendhil Mullianathan’s paper Automating Automaticity: How the Context of Human Choice Affects the Extent of Algorithmic Bias.
- By
- March 13, 2024
- CAAI - Behavioral Science