Last month, Twitter announced plans to roll out a new kind of feed next year that will filter what users see. The change, according to CFO Anthony Noto, is aimed at helping to bring interesting and useful content to users stymied by their raw feeds. While the plans are controversial to early adopters of the platform, the fact is that some novices–and potential users–are overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of tweets, which are presented in a endless stream sorted only by time. Unless users carefully select and organize who they follow, it can be difficult to sort through the noise. By making Twitter’s newsfeed a little more like Facebook’s, curated by an algorithm that shows the most relevant posts by and about someone’s network, people might be able to engage with it better.
But according to Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist who has written prolifically on the subject, mostly on Medium, there’s another answer. Rather than Twitter curating feeds, Tufekci recommends that the company offer better tutorials with suggestions for users to follow, ways of finding who to follow, and ways to make lists more useful.
“[P]erhaps Twitter can help users construct a better, more diverse, less homophilic network by suggesting different kinds of users, rather than the ones already like the ones a person follows,” she writes. In other words, Tufekci wonders if it’s possible for users to curate their accounts themselves by learning how rather than by relying on platforms to choose what is newsworthy.
Her proposal sounds like she is asking Twitter to focus on helping users improve their news consumption networks (rather than make one for them), which is a news literacy skill. Most, if not all, news literacy efforts claim to focus on teaching students how to be their own searchers, finders, assessors, verifiers, and publishers of information. But most news literacy initiatives are still focused on gaining footholds into school systems and teaching the traditional basics rather than broaching digital literacy, and few include the participation of digital platforms themselves.
Geanne Perlman Rosenberg, director of the Harnisch Journalism Projects at Baruch College, highlights educators’ own lack of knowledge of online tools as an obstacle for teaching students to find the “needles” of vetted information in the haystack of online content.
“The good news is that the needles are there, more than ever before, and that there are wonderful precision search tools to find them,” she wrote in the Journal of Digital and Media Literacy last summer. “The bad news is that most educators are not informed themselves about the search tools available and do not know how to teach high quality search strategies and that most students simply are not being adequately educated about how to find information online.”
And while effective curriculum on how to vet sources online has been developed in the news literacy movement, strategies on assembling a balanced, engaging feed of sources have yet to be deeply explored.
The problem with using an algorithm built to look for more of the same the way Facebook’s does, as Poynter’s Sam Kirkland points out, is that it limits the news a user might encounter. He writes:
Facebook would say they’re not really deciding what news matters — they’re just revealing what news really resonates with each individual user. And that’s how you end up with Ice Bucket Challenge videos dominating your News Feed instead of the latest information about Ferguson protests. Why should Facebook serve you vegetables when it knows you’d rather have the 8 Most Insanely Unhealthy Restaurant Meals In America?
This type of filtering has social consequences; every time an algorithm gets fancier, a reader loses the chance to make key decisions about how his or her feed is structured, and the chance to understand how the content is served.
“Twitter brims with human judgment, and the problem with algorithmic filtering is not losing the chronology, which I admit can be clumsy at times, but it’s losing the human judgment that makes the network rewarding and sometimes unpredictable,” Tufekci writes.
Unfortunately, the only real guides that exist to help users hone these skills are one-off online tutorials and how-to articles. More advanced investigations of how algorithms work and how to work with them to construct a news feed (for example, this type of user’s guide to Facebook based on understanding how its algorithm works) could reach wider audiences by being boiled down for use in news literacy training.
Then, whether users are on Twitter to follow global breaking news, to keep abreast of the the latest wonky developments in New York City education policy, or to stay informed on the goings-on of Beyonce, they will be the ones to decide what they see.
Funding for this coverage is provided by the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
Jihii Jolly is a freelance journalist and video producer in New York City