Do Facebook and Google have control of their algorithms anymore? A sobering assessment and a warning

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: November 15, 2017 at 11:00:04 AM EST
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Do Facebook and Google have control of their algorithms anymore? A sobering assessment and a 
> warning
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend David Rosenthal.  DLH]
>
> Do Facebook and Google have control of their algorithms anymore? A sobering assessment and a warning 
> By MELODY KRAMER
> Nov 14 2017
> <http://amp.poynter.org/news/conversation-about-machine-learning-and-journalism-maciej-ceglowski-pinboard>
>
> If you searched Google immediately after the recent mass shooting in Texas for information on the gunman, you would 
> have seen what Justin Hendrix, the head of the NYC Media Lab, called a “misinformation gutter.” A spokesperson for 
> Google later gave a statement to Gizmodo that placed blame squarely on an algorithm:
>
> "The search results appearing from Twitter, which surface based on our ranking algorithms, are changing second by 
> second and represent a dynamic conversation that is going on in near real-time. For the queries in question, they are 
> not the first results we show on the page. Instead, they appear after news sources, including our Top Stories 
> carousel which we have been constantly updating. We’ll continue to look at ways to improve how we rank tweets that 
> appear in search."
>
> In other words, it was an algorithm — not a human making editorial decisions — that was responsible for this gaffe. 
> But as Gizmodo’s Tom McKay pointed out, this kind of framing is intentional and used frequently by Twitter and other 
> social networks when problems arise.
>
> He writes: “Google, Twitter, and Facebook have all regularly shifted the blame to algorithms when this happens, but 
> the issue is that said companies write the algorithms, making them responsible for what they churn out.”
>
> Algorithms can be gamed, algorithms can be trained on biased information, and algorithms can shield platforms from 
> blame. Mike Ananny puts it this way:
>
> By continually claiming that it is a technology company — not a media company — Facebook can claim that any perceived 
> errors in Trending Topics or News Feed products are the result of algorithms that need tweaking, artificial 
> intelligence that needs more training data, or reflections of users. It claims that it is not taking any editorial 
> position.
>
> Platforms rely on these algorithms to perform actions at scale, but algorithms at scale also become increasingly 
> inscrutable, even to the people who wrote the code. In her recent TED Talk about the complexity of AI, Zeynep Tufekci 
> points out that not even the people behind Facebook’s algorithms truly understand them:
>
> We no longer really understand how these complex algorithms work. We don't understand how they're doing this 
> categorization. It's giant matrices, thousands of rows and columns, maybe millions of rows and columns, and not the 
> programmers and not anybody who looks at it, even if you have all the data, understands anymore how exactly it's 
> operating any more than you'd know what I was thinking right now if you were shown a cross section of my brain. It's 
> like we're not programming anymore, we're growing intelligence that we don't truly understand.
>
> This is problematic for journalism. We cannot write about what we cannot see, but we increasingly write about what we 
> think will be surfaced by these algorithms, which generate eyeballs, which then generate clicks, which then generate 
> an increasingly smaller pool of digital ad dollars (the majority of which are now going to Facebook and Google.)
>
> And despite our (perhaps) growing unease with these platforms, we still rely on the them for distribution. In their 
> excellent report on the convergence between publishers and platforms, Emily Bell and Taylor Owen write that “A 
> growing number of news organizations see investing in social platforms as the only prospect for a sustainable future, 
> whether for traffic or for reach,” echoing what Franklin Foer recently wrote in The Atlantic about The New Republic’s 
> increasing dependency on these platforms — and what their algorithms might surface: “Dependence generates desperation 
> — a mad, shameless chase to gain clicks through Facebook, a relentless effort to game Google’s algorithms. It leads 
> media outlets to sign terrible deals that look like self-preserving necessities: granting Facebook the right to sell 
> their advertising, or giving Google permission to publish articles directly on its fast-loading server. In the end, 
> such arrangements simply allow Facebook and Google to hold these companies ever tighter.”  
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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