[Behind the screens:
Who decides what I see online?]
Hi, my name’s Taylor.
I study the internet and journalism,
and how we as citizens receive
information about the world.
In the olden days
when people got information,
it was mostly decided by people.
There were humans that decided
what we needed to know.
So when we opened the newspaper
or turned on the evening news,
it was a person that decided
what we heard and saw.
The result of that is
that we all knew similar things.
Now the internet has changed everything.
When you go online,
when you open an application,
what you see is determined not by a person
but by a machine.
And this is awesome in a lot of ways.
It allows you to use Google Maps,
it allows you to order food online,
it allows you to connect
with friends around the world
and share information,
but there are aspects of this machine that
we need to think really carefully about
because they determine
the information that we all receive
as citizens in a society
and in a democracy.
So when you open up an app
and you’re shown a picture
in your Snapchat feed,
all of that information
is determined by this machine,
and that machine is driven
by the incentives of the company
that owns the website
or owns the application.
And the incentive is for you
to spend as much time as possible
inside that application.
So they do things that make you feel
very good about being there.
They allow people to like your photos.
They show you content
that they think you want to see
that will either make you
really happy or really angry
that will get an emotional response
from you to keep you there.
That is because they want to show you
as many ads as possible when you’re there
because that is their business model.
They’re also taking that same
opportunity of you being in their app
to collect data about you.
And they use these data to create detailed
profiles of your life and your behaviour,
and these profiles can then be used
to target more ads back to you.
And that then determines
what you see as well.
But all of this isn’t just about
the business model of these companies,
it actually has an impact on our democracy
because what we each see on the internet
is highly customized to us,
to what we like,
to what we believe,
to what we want to see or want to believe.
And that means that as a society,
we no longer all have
a shared set of knowledge
which is hard for a democracy
that requires us to work together
and know the same things to make
decisions about our lives together.
When we all know different things
and we’re all being siloed into
our own little bubbles of information,
it’s incredibility difficult for us
to get along with one another.
We have no shared experience
or shared knowledge.
I think it’s really important
that we think critically
about the information we receive online
and about the companies
and structures that determine
what we see on the internet.
[NewsWise is a project of CIVIX&
The Canadian Journalism Foundation]
Subtitles by Claudia Contreras
Review by Carol Wang