Blog Post #3
For this blog post research, I focused on understanding how social media algorithms actually work. You can’t look into the ways misinformation spreads without looking about algorithms and what is going on behind the scenes to perpetuate it. I expected algorithms to be more complicated or technical, but the more I researched the more I realized the core idea is pretty simple. The platform’s goal is to keep us watching and they show us whatever does that best.
I learned that every small thing you do online, if you like a video, share it, comment on it or swipe right past becomes a signal to them and is being logged. One of the most helpful resources I found was a TikTok transparency report explaining how the For You Page (fyp) is built, through tracking things like watch time, interactions and what kind of content similar users engage with. When researching information on this topic I also read a study that was done which found that posts that were emotionally charged were found to spread quicker and get prioritized more by engagements ranking systems (Brady et al., 2017). This explained the idea that algorithms are not designed to push accurate content, they’re designed to push whatever gets the strongest reactions.
From what I have learned algorithms systems are what change the way people interact and understand the content they see. If people are constantly engaging with certain videos and if they are an emotionally charged video which already gets more attention they would be more likely to believe it. This also highlights the issue of digital literacy, because if more people understood algorithms they would be less susceptible to believe everything they see.
Overall, this research helped me understand that content doesn’t go viral by accident, it goes viral because the platforms are programmed to amplify whatever performs well, not what is accurate.
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