The Aggro-rhythm
“Algorithm” along with “AI” are definitely two top buzzwords in modern times, although both have been around a very long time, they are now the most famous they have ever been.
With social media apps now a critical tool in communicating (mis)information, what we see and how many people we can reach has become the remit of powerful people with specific agendas, the truth not being one of them.
I had about 13k followers on Twitter back in the day, along with the all-important blue tick to confirm my celebrity status after a few television appearances. I remember enjoying a relatively healthy engagement with my many followers, a few posts doing extraordinarily well, a few maybe even went ‘viral’. I remember ‘trending’ on Twitter on two occasions, and overall the experience of being on Twitter seemed enjoyable, an effective way to engage with fans (and haters).
After a few years, I started getting bored of social media and slowly began to abandon a regular effort to post anything. Unfortunately for me, this is almost exactly when it became really important to regularly post content, especially videos. By the time I decided to get back on the horse, the landscape of social media had changed, most importantly; the algorithm that drives it all.
It’s no secret now, the algorithm is somewhat a mystery of what get to be disseminated to the masses. There are shadow bans for certain political content that rails against human sacrifices made in the name of mythology and racism, and what is shown to us is down to the whims of whoever controls the algorithm. Our social media profiles might be a reflection of who we are, but what we are shown is entirely dependent on what the algorithm dictates. A curated serving of what we can consume, which is more often than not a serving of hate and doom. Whilst much of legacy media has been controlled by a few people and organisations, social media seemingly liberated us from them, albeit for a while, but now it seems we are back to square one. However, the cat is out of the bag these days, and efforts to democratise our newsfeeds, for the truth to reach more people, has become a frontier that is being fought for by better technologists and activists. Whilst the most popular social media platforms are now wholly compromised, a new platform called UpScrolled has emerged. The FAQ is a good place to start, and the personalities behind it all have deeply invested in building an algorithm with a moral compass, promising to be unprecedentedly more ethical than any other app we’ve engaged with before.
It’s early days, check them out here – https://upscrolled.com/en/faq/
