Here’s How Facebook’s News Feed Actually Works

 



"When University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researcher Karrie Karahalios was trying to conduct a study on how people change their online behavior based on the presence of a News Feed algorithm, though, she ran into a problem. Many of the people she interviewed didn’t even realize the algorithm existed."



"In Karahalios’ 2013 study, which involved 40 subjects who were selected to mimic the demographics of the U.S. population, 62% of people didn’t know that their News Feeds were being filtered. When the algorithm was explained to one subject, she compared the revelation to the moment when Neo discovers the artificiality of The Matrix. “We got a lot of visceral responses to the discovery when they didn’t know,” Karahalios says. “A lot of people just spent literally five minutes being in shock.”
Though from a small group, that reaction underscores the growing anxiety among Internet users about having algorithms help control their digital lives, not just on Facebook but on sites like Google, Amazon and Twitter."

read the study by Victor Luckerson

Here’s How Facebook’s News Feed Actually Works | TIME