A new movement aims to take back some control of our online lives.
 | By Suein Hwang Business, Economics and Technology Editor, Opinion |
Individual determination powers American capitalism, or so we thought. When we get behind the steering wheel of a car of our choosing, we drive ourselves to a destination of our choice. When we go to a newsstand, we select and purchase our favorite magazine. |
Yet the social-media behemoths force us into the back seat: When we open our Instagram or Facebook feed, we must engage with the friends, the ads, the updates and the videos that an algorithm has chosen for us. |
There are enormous societal consequences to our learned passivity. We can become prejudiced by information that only confirms what we already think; we can also be pushed toward increasingly extreme thinking. We can inadvertently reward the creators of content that is inappropriate or even horrifying. |
There is an alternative. In her latest piece for Times Opinion, Julia Angwin discusses the growing worldwide movement toward algorithmic choice. She describes her experiences using the social network Bluesky, where users can choose from a wide selection of already curated feeds — cute animal photos, Major League Baseball to posts from her extended social circle. Advanced users can even build their own algorithms and offer them to others. |
Algorithmic choice certainly doesn't solve all of the woes created by social media. Perhaps the biggest challenge to the nascent movement is demand: So far, it seems that consumers have little interest in it. But that could change if the benefits become clear. "I didn't know I wanted an iPhone, either, until I saw one," Angwin writes. |
"I believe that asking people to choose disinformation — rather than accept it passively — would make a difference," she continues. "If users had to pick an anti-vaccine news feed, and see that there are other feeds to choose from, the existence of that choice would itself be educational." I certainly hope she's right. |
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