Facebook Wants a Do-Over on News
This time around, the company would rather you focus on the humans.
Updated at 4:27 p.m. on August 22, 2019.
One especially sharp aphorism about the internet’s attention economy likens webpages to car crashes. Explaining to The New York Times in 2017 how likes and shares drive users toward extremes, Evan Williams, the co-creator of Twitter, Medium, and Blogger, that news-feed algorithms, trained to serve us the most attention-grabbing content, will do so ruthlessly. Using the web, Williams said, is like driving down the road, seeing a car crash, then becoming momentarily fixated on the accident. Registering this, the algorithms that run the internet then serve you more car crashes, knowing only that the carnage supports their primary goal: getting and maintaining attention.
