Bursting the Filter Bubble: Seeing Who Facebook Thinks You’re Most Interested In

Who Facebook thinks I’m obsessed with

Last week, the Keesh made a fascinating Facebook find. It discovered a file that contains information on who Facebook thinks you’re most interested in. Gawker calls it the “secret list of people you’re stalking the most.” You can see it yourself by dragging this link — Facebook Friend Ranking — to your browser bar, and then clicking on it while you’re on Facebook.com (if you’ve enabled secure browsing, you’ll have to turn it off). If you’ve done this, you should now be looking at a list of Facebook users with scores next to their names; it appears to be a ranking of the people whose profiles you’ve interacted with most and whose content you’ve clicked on most frequently.

My list is at right. My tendency to scroll through my boyfriend’s photo albums has given him a strong placement at the top of the list. My (professional) obsession with company CEO Mark Zuckerberg embarrassingly puts him in the top ten of my “most-stalked” list. I asked Facebook for an official comment on what exactly the scores mean, and whether, now that this tool has been exposed, they’ll make it a feature on Facebook — so that people can see it without using a hacking tool. Facebook has not responded to that query.

The fact that Facebook keeps track of everything we click on while on its site isn’t news. Back in 2010, an anonymous Facebook employee spilled the dirt on the fact that Facebook keeps track of  “everything: Every photo you view, every person you’re tagged with, every wall-post you make, and so forth.” I’ve written before about Facebook then using algorithms to filter your news stream to only show you content from the people it determines you’re most interested in. (Which was dismaying to the people whose content was deemed uninteresting by Facebook.) What is new is that this gives you a little illicit peek inside that algorithm. It’s a peek that The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You author Eli Pariser has encouraged Facebook to give to its users.

“I think of myself as a pretty well-informed Facebook user but there’s all this stuff happening behind the scenes to determine what I see and what I don’t,” said Pariser in an interview earlier this year. “I was annoyed that Facebook was saying you think you want to hear more from your conservative friends, but you actually want to see articles and videos only from your liberal friends.”

Pariser’s book is focused on the threat to access to information (and ultimately democracy) posed by algorithms that we can’t see — on Facebook, but also on Google and around the Web — increasingly being used to filter the information that comes to us. While most of us see the algorithms as a godsend given the information overload on the Internet and the necessity to narrow it down somehow, Pariser worries about the algorithms getting too good at delivering exactly who and what we’re interested in and thus limiting exposure to new ideas and people. It’s not a new concern. A decade ago, scholars like Cass Sunstein (in “Republic.com”) and Andrew Shapiro (in “The Control Revolution”) expressed fear about the Internet making it too easy for individuals to personalize their information streams.

“Sunstein’s argument was that, given infinite choice of views on the Internet, people would seek out their own views and get stuck in an echochamber,” says Pariser. “What I’m saying now is that people aren’t seeking it out, it’s just what comes to them. The echochamber is created for them.”

Pariser thinks one solution for people discomforted by the personalized content is essentially to see the walls of their echochamber: greater transparency by those doing the filtering, so that people know what data was used to target them and how their content is different from other people’s. That’s an argument in favor of knowing who exactly Facebook thinks you’re interested in — with a score for exactly how interested you are.

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