In the 2010s, I was assigned to manage my workplace’s Twitter account and to my surprise I loved it. Twitter was a fantastic place to connect with everyone involved around a shared interest. For a hobby, you would be connecting not only with other fans but also with journalists, creatives, and even official brand accounts. For my work, it was possible to bring government officials, vulnerable populations, advocates, and journalists together into one conversation. It was fantastic and at one point I was running multiple themed twitter accounts.
Then the Twitter algorithm was adjusted to ‘maximize engagement’, that is to keep individual users on Twitter consuming content for as much time as possible.
- Initially Twitter mostly showed users tweets in chronological order from the people and use selected ‘interests’ they decided to follow.
- Then Twitter decided to filter the tweets from the people users decided to follow and prioritize showing ‘engaging’ tweets.
- Finally, Twitter decided to downplay that whole following thing and give more focus to tweets the algorithm thought you’d engage with from anyone.
What was the result of this shift? Twitter was flooded with incendiary arguments that drowned out the organic engagement that had made it special. For my hobby accounts tweets on niche interests went unseen as the algorithm decided they weren’t engaging enough. For work tweets focused on collaboration, agreement, and information sharing went unseen in favor of tweets that were deemed to be more engaging. Usually, more engaging meant controversial since controversy generates more engagement. The culture wars had always been fought on Twitter but the algorithm changes put these at the forefront of every account’s experience.
For most of the 2010s, my Twitter notifications were full of people following me, liking my tweets, responding to my tweets, and retweeting me.
By the end of the 2010s, my Twitter Notifications were full of trash ‘did you miss this’ and ‘this might interest you’ from people I didn’t even follow. There was almost no genuine engagement.
So why does this matter now? Well, because pretty much every one of the megacorporations that oversee our digital lives are pursuing similar strategies to maximize engagement. There’s much more at stake here than social media firms burning out it’s users with content that manipulates them to engage at unhealthy levels. What we’re seeing online from our friends, families, communities, and news (if we see them at all) is being curated by companies whose primary objective is to make a line go up on a quarterly report. Their objective is to maximize the extraction of value from people’s social lives. It’s not enough for them to extract some value, in order to make the line go up every quarter corporations are driven to extract the maximum possible value even if that causes widespread harm and/or ultimately undermines their long-term business model. This has real impacts on how we see the world, our families, our communities, and even ourselves.