My feed showed me a video of a protest I was in, but it cut out the part where the cops shoved us

I was scrolling last Tuesday and an app suggested a clip from a rally I attended in Chicago. The video was sharp, but it only showed protestors yelling, not the moment three officers pushed a guy right next to me. The algorithm picked the most 'engaging' angry faces. It hit me then: I've been treating these feeds like news, but they're just showing me what keeps me glued, not what happened. I felt sick realizing I'd been getting a skewed view of other events for months, trusting a system built for clicks, not truth. So is the bigger problem the biased editing, or the fact that the algorithm rewards it by pushing it to more people? Where do we even start to fix that feeling?

4 comments

4 Comments

jason_lewis32mo agoMost Upvoted

The algorithm is the real problem because it decides what millions of people see. We need to demand transparency in how these things are built.

ellioth372mo ago

How do we even start pushing for that?

aaron3052mo ago

What does transparency even look like in practice though?

anderson.piper5d ago

Transparency is like that friend who says they'll be honest with you but then leaves out all the important details. It sounds good on paper but in practice it means showing the receipts not just the highlights. We see this everywhere from companies promising "ethical sourcing" with no actual proof to politicians talking about open government while hiding their emails. The algorithm thing is just the tech version of the same old pattern where people say the right words but never show how the sausage is made. If they really wanted transparency they would give us access to the data and the code not just a vague blog post about "values".