Behind the Screens: Who decides what I see online?

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[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
and 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.

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[NewsWise is a project of CIVIX
& The Canadian Journalism Foundation]

Subtitles by Claudia Contreras
Review by Carol Wang