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.

So, 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.