Frances Haugen (whistleblower who was part of the company's civic integrity team) says Facebook is broken. Haugen argued in testimony before Congress and in media that social giants' algorithms are responsible for a variety of maladies, including teen mental health problems and ethnic violence in Ethiopia. Facebookno has many problems and there is no single solution. However, Haugen's suggestion stood out.
She stated that she is a strong advocate of chronological ordering, which orders by time, with a bit of spam demotion. Software that is human-scaled should be used to facilitate conversations between humans and not computers.
This is what you can imagine! Imagine humans having conversations together. Haugen recommends that items be displayed in the order people post them to Facebook, not in an ordered determined by algorithms. This world would not dictate what you see. Timing is everything. This would prevent the algorithm delaying logs from being posted on the most inflamatory posts.
This is not a radical idea. In 2016, Instagram gave the algorithm control of your feed. In 2016, Instagram gave the algorithm control over your feed. You can also remove the algorithm from the Facebook News Feed today. It's something I do for the past two weeks.
It's not like Facebook hides this option. You can click Most Recent on desktop by clicking the link in the left hand pane. Mobile users will find Most Recent under the hamburger menu at the upper-right. The experience can be fleeting, Facebook warns. The company help page warns that you can sort your News Feed to view recent posts. However, News Feed will eventually go back to its default setting.
Let me make it clear: I am not a Facebook power user. Since 2019, I have posted 3-4 times per year. All of these posts were WIRED stories or attempts at generating business for my daughters Girl Scout cookie side venture. My account is private and I am a member only of three to four groups. More than half of them haven't posted in the past year. However, I do occasionally check in on three of the other groups and was unaware of the others. However, any honest accounting would show that I only use Facebook once a week. It's called Marketplace voyeurism, or force of habit. I know how the News Feed works and was amazed at how different it made my experience.
I don't want to exaggerate things. The problems that Haugen suggests chronology might fix are not what I see in my social media bubble. It is difficult to say if the experience is better than Facebook's currently available. It says a lot about Facebook, which is far more fascinating.
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Over the last 13 years, I have 975 friends on Facebook. 15 pages are my favorite. This list mainly consists of news outlets and a few friends who converted to Pages or Cheez-Its. Cheez-Its are delicious.
It is possible to imagine that, in a healthy social media network, even in chronological mode the ratio of posts from brands to friends would roughly reflect the percentage in which they are followed. It's not hard to see that chronological Twitter works in this way. There are ebbs, flows, and real-time activity throughout the day, which map the human activity of those you follow.
