This is Rhizome Today for Wednesday, January 22, 2015. This post will be deleted on January 23.
Writing yesterday at the Awl, Matt Buchanan noted the epistemological gymnastics plied by Facebook's Erich Owens, Software Engineer, and Udi Weinsberg, Research Scientist, in discussing a recent change to the News Feed algorithm to less widely distribute "hoax" content:
A hoax, according to Facebook, is "a form of News Feed spam." This can include, but is not limited to "scams ('Click here to win a lifetime supply of coffee'), or deliberately false or misleading news stories ('Man sees dinosaur on hike in Utah')." The problem with these "hoaxes" is not their lack of truth, per se, but that the people who post them sometimes "later decide to delete their original posts," especially if their friends later comment that their post is a hoax—this makes them "two times more likely to delete these types of posts." Engagement deleted is engagement wasted; this is the truly terrible thing about hoaxes.
What is a not-hoax then—that is, truth? Truth is that which will be shared and not deleted.
Sharing and commenting and liking is Engagement. Engagement is Truth. Truth is what is. A scary thought when what determines that capacity for Engagement is an algorithm tailored to the black-boxed interests of a for-profit enterprise.
What then is to be done? One response is that of spite. Yes, I come here not to bury The Deleter, a pitied and maligned internet character, but to praise them. Cull your posts. Delete your pasts. Take up a minor subversion. (That spite, however, is at one's peril, as with Rhizome in deleting its Today posts each day from our feed, and seeing our FB distribution plummet alongside.)
If you'd like to succeed in this new algorithm, however, I'd recommend you read VoiceandTone.com, created in 2012 by Mailchimp. (The site was re-circulated around the office yesterday by Heather Corcoran, Rhizome's Executive Director, who was looking for "Mailkimp" jokes.) This is an easy-to-use guide to improving one's ability to read a user's mood, and respond in a manner that induces the most positive engagement. That is, it's a guide to succeeding in an algorithm-driven landscape.
What it asks is that Mailchimp staff, in responding to users, identify keywords which indicate sentiment, which then trigger types of response. (Trust=Casual. Interest=Directness. Anticipation=brevity.) But, as a public site, it can also be thought of as a training guide for users through which they can become perfect neoliberal subjects whose emotional responses follow a set of predetermined scripts. Become a bot, and succeed in the feed.