Ita O’Kelly
Beware the algorithms watching you every time you use the internet
WEallliketo think that we all ‘own’ the internet, including the great, the good, the rich, the powerful, the politicians and the rest of us.
It is convenient to imagine it as a free debating chamber where we are all equal players. It allows you to be as outraged as you wish and/ or sell your brand 24-hours-a-day because the internet never closes for business.
However, if your followers share your views, as is common, then you have an echo chamber rather than a debating chamber.
In truth, we merely have access to the internet and we pay a significant price for the privilege.
In this data-centric global economy, we supply our data by clicking ‘yes’ to everything when we sign up on social media platforms.
Given that data is the oil equivalent of the 21st century, we are making these ‘sharing’ companies all-powerful and very rich.
Platforms like Facebook and Google monetise your data by introducing you, ‘the user’, to advertisers who pay for this access.
Some time ago I looked up how to bleed a radiator on Google. I was deluged with advertisements for plumbers for weeks.
The business model used is similar to Uber, which introduces customers to drivers, and Airbnb, which introduces visitors to those with rooms to rent. Such platforms do not manufacture or create anything.
The magic ingredient in their success is an algorithm, a coding programme which can sift through vast quantities of data and establish patterns. Every time you like or share something, the computer is sharpening your profile and filtering your news accordingly.
In advertising, they always say that 50pc of the spend is a waste of money but they don’t know which 50pc. Algorithms allow companies to cheaply and accurately target customers more likely to buy the goods or services.
The duopoly of Google and Facebook makes them the main financial beneficiaries earning the lion’s share of around half the world’s digital advertising revenue annually.
Even Orwell, prescient as he was, could never have envisaged anything on this scale.
On the plus side, social media can be a wonderful cauldron of fun, information and discourse. Of course, the mad, the bad and the sad are there too.
Social media started out as an empowering way to connect and to share. All the indicators were it was designed as a democratic machine. That has changed.
I believe that everyone is entitled to their opinion, whether I agree with it or not.
As a journalist, I have always been aware that I am privileged to be able to use my voice publicly in a newspaper.
As I see it, my role is to merely start a conversation. But it costs to start that conversation.
Increasingly, content is not appearing online, in this publication and others, because ‘content providers’, as journalists and their employers are now sadly termed, are not benefiting from the process.
It costs money to source, verify, write, and curate so-called content, otherwise known as news and analysis.
If the content is ‘shared’ free of charge by a platform, the creators of the content are cut out of the monetary equation and their business model is annihilated.
The alternative is news generated by computers, fake or otherwise, call it what you will. Or pictures and videos of an awful lot of cute kittens.
While social media has provided many people with a voice, the fact that many choose to remain anonymous is problematic. I respect anyone’s point of view, but not those who won’t reveal their identity.
Recent trends in online commentary in Ireland are troubling. ‘If I don’t like or agree with what you are saying, then you shouldn’t be allowed to say it’ is perhaps as good a summary as any.
Such an attitude shuts down discourse.
There are two sides to every story. Debate is healthy in a democracy. Some publications only allow you to comment online if you are a subscriber. This shuts down any dissent.
The story of the woman who wrote ‘thank you’ every time she put a search into Google is still my all-time favourite.
As you open your phone this morning to connect and share with the world and read your filtered news, it is worth remembering that a virtual warehouse of computers, otherwise known as an algorithm, named after the Latin name of a Persian mathematician, is watching and monetising you as you scroll.
Big Tech is watching you – and very closely too.