The Follow Paradox

(عربي)

A small radio in a bunker can make its owner feel like he’s connected to the world, even if no real mutual communication is happening with real people, the feeling of being associated with the world is still important. Probably that feeling isn’t as important as it is for all people, as some people aren’t really interested in reading the news, but it’s still important and it increases and decreases according to specific circumstances. As some extreme form of that feeling, some people wish to understand what is happening in the world, haunted by the idea of globalism, some of us try to understand what’s happening in all the parts of the world equally, to know the news from many resources, and to follow news sources from different countries in different languages, to follow as many public figures as possible, not necessarily by opening their web pages and social media pages, but via a Palantir [magical ball used by witches] called Facebook or Twitter wall. That Palantir is surrounded by many controversies that create a paradox of following what’s happening in the world.

The first problem in Palantir is that we are originally on social media because we want to follow our friends, to see what people say about us (mainly about photos and opinions we share), and then to know what’s happening in the world via Palantir. Now, we would be biased towards the people that we follow and towards what people say about us, so only a small space remains for the world. Despite our main focus is “us” and the few people that we care about or we are interested in, our follows and likes list shows a different thing, where there’re hundreds or thousands of pages that we decided to follow.

After that, comes the algorithm of social network to impose what the network may see as a tax for the free service that we are using, advertisements. All the advertisements and promoted posts will appear based on the policy of the network, which may also impose and prefer other posts from what we already following or liking. To be honest, even if the algorithm wanted to be fair with us, there’s no practical way to show us all what we decided to like, will it really show us the likes and follows posts that represent our declared preferences, or will it show more the things we really care about? The world cannot be reduced to a Facebook wall. Can the Indian president’s posts be shown for someone who’s trying to follow India’s news as much as the posts of close friends and enemies? When we decide to join a free network and to follow 500 pages to satisfy our globalism fetish, we should know then that there’s no real way to follow all these pages. The other side of the paradox is that the more we pretend to care about following up on what’s going on in the world, the more we will lose the ability to do so via social media as a result of the profusion in the follows and likes.

The Follow Paradox makes us easy targets for advertisements. We label ourselves into marketing, ideological or even sexual groups, and anyone who understands machine learning knows how valuable these labels are. Our likes sometimes specify who we are, especially when we notice that huge disputes may happen in some group of people when one of them decides to like someone or some post that the group doesn’t like. Likes really identify our declared identity, while our real interests are hidden into the clicks and the time spent on each post and page, which the algorithm is fully aware of and able to analyze and to match with our declared labels. By mixing the two layers of interest, the algorithm is able to provide even more powerful insights about us. Which then leads to more powerful direct and indirect targeting, the direct targeting is to show more ads based on our exact classification, while the indirect targeting – which I am only theoretically talking about and assuming that it exists – includes motivating the behavior that makes us stay more, interact more, and watch more ads. Let’s try to be innocent here and assume that the only final target here is ads, not anything else (like changing the elections by changing peoples’ opinions).

We must admit that we don’t care, and even if we really care about some cause in the world, then the way to build a real interest in that cause should go beyond just following a page on Twitter, and that the over-following/liking don’t really connect us with the world contemporary issues, but it just puts us inside the Follow Paradox.

Now, will I be the first to take action against the Follow Paradox? I think I can remember only 20 pages of what I currently follow in Twitter. What I need to do is to cancel all these follows, after putting them into a list. Then, I must reselect groups of what I need to follow with a condition that they don’t exceed 20-30 in total, and the purge process should be done again later after spending enough time with the topic that I selected to follow. That seems to be very difficult, yes? We are already following pages on social media because it’s easy, otherwise, we could’ve checked the news websites instead of relying on the social media wall. In this case, we should still dislike/unfollow everything or at least re-decide, did we really receive updates from that page? Or we have just slid into a cliff in the algorithm when it started to think that we care about some topic after we just followed it lightly for a few days, so it started to think that we care about it? Or maybe we really care about it?

July 2022 Update: 

It seems like Twitter and possibly other social networks have new methods to draw a path of what they want you to see. You don’t see only the posts of those who you’re following, here, the Follow paradox seems a mild thing. You’d see posts liked by those who you’re following, spaces of interest, common content, viral content, content viral in your area, and content published by someone followed by persons you follow, you’d see all these types of content, but not what you actually wanted to follow. All that gives the ability to the social network to present what they want, not what you want, and what is the purpose of that? There’re many possible outcomes.