Facebook, Ferguson, and the Ice Bucket Challenge
On the evening of August 13 [2014], the police appeared on the streets of Ferguson in armored vehicles and wearing military gear, with snipers poised in position and pointing guns at the protesters. That is when I first noticed the news of Ferguson on Twitter—and was startled at such a massive overuse of police force in a suburban area in the United States.
On Twitter, among about a thousand people around the world that I follow, and which was still sorted chronologically at the time, the topic became dominant.
On Facebook's algorithmically controlled news feed, however, it was as if nothing had happened.
As I inquired more broadly, it appeared that Facebook’s algorithm may have decided that the Ferguson stories were lower priority to show to many users than other, more algorithm-friendly ones.
Instead of news of the Ferguson protests, my own Facebook's news feed was dominated by the “ice-bucket challenge,” a worthy cause in which people poured buckets of cold water over their heads and, in some cases, donated to an amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) charity. Many other people were reporting a similar phenomenon.
Facebook's algorithm was not prioritizing posts about the “Ice Bucket Challenge” rather than Ferguson posts because of a nefarious plot by Facebook's programmers or marketing department to bury the nascent social movement. The algorithm they designed and whose priorities they set, combined with the signals they allowed users on the platform to send, created that result.