Fabiana Urbina

Honors 175

8 February 2021

Evaluation Paper

Today, people are vastly informed when it comes to how social media is shaped

to fit exactly what is deemed by the company to be the consumers interest. So much so that it has

turned into a reoccurring joke between social media users. But this was not the case six years

ago, in spite of there being articles, studies and even disclaimers posted by Facebook and other

social media platforms themselves, no all their users were aware of the parameters placed on

their feed. Alexis Madrigal’s article ‘Many, many Facebook users still don't know that their

news feeds are filtered by an algorithm’ assessed research conducted on volunteering

participants known as the “unaware” to reveal that a big pool of social media users, specifically

Facebook users sat in the dark unknowingly surfing through their feeds only seeing what

Facebook thought their target content was. Alexis Madrigal used both constructive qualitative

and quantitative creditable resources, which gave insight and highlighted the number of statistics

and experiences of the people that were not aware that a platform like Facebook had such thing

as an algorithm.

In this piece there are as many as five sources presented to inform the audience about the

unconscious use of Facebook by their less prominent users. To begin with, the article uses a

comment in a newspaper from Motahhare Eslami a Urbana-Champaign doctoral students about

the Facebook’s new feed algorithm and their effects on the people that fall victim to the

parameters. The most investigated source in Alexis Madrigal’s article ‘Many, many Facebook
users still don't know that their news feeds are filtered by an algorithm’ is a primary source

qualitative research study conducted by the University of Illinois, with well known results

commonly used across articles on the internet. Within the research by University of Illinois, the

team of researchers they developed a tool that was used as a primary source to tap into

Facebook’s API in order to show their participants what their feeds would be like if they did not

have the limitations. Inserted in the research itself as the main source of where the data is being

collected from is the participants themselves, which were interviewed. Lastly, briefly mentioned

by both a participant in the research and the author herself later on was the movie ‘Matrix’ used

as a secondary source to express the way they felt about their oblivious use of Facebook.

Across the different sources used in this piece, the way that each of them was discussed

was limited. For a shorter and to the point article that is informative and could be understood

among various audience Alexis Madrigal provided the right amount of information. Motahhare

Eslami’s comment "In the extreme case, it may be that whenever a software developer in Menlo

Park adjusts a parameter, someone somewhere wrongly starts to believe themselves to be

unloved," is taken by the author to demonstrate how insignificant the change might be viewed to

the ones doing it, but effect wrongly the consumers on the other end. The qualitative as well as

the quantitative data from the research managed by the University of Illinois was used through

the piece introduced “The new qualitative research study sampled 40 Facebook users and ran

them through an in-depth examination of the ways that Facebook filters their experience”.

Although in this article Alexis Madrigal did not have a concrete argument choosing a side, in this

case there was a big concentration on how whether the participants were avid or less frequented

Facebook users, they should know why they are seeing the things they do despite following a big

pool of people. Feedvis was used to show the participants how it would be without the
limitations, therefore it is not mentioned as often, mostly for when it was introduced. The

participants also known as the ‘unaware’ were interviewed and quoted with their experience how

emotions to how they felt now that they were enlightened with the fact that it was not other

people neglecting their love through post, but it was the algorithm. The author highlights the

comments made by the participant, since she wants to inform the public of how being unaware of

how their social media functions affect the way they feel when using the platforms. In order to

connect with something that many audiences could link the experience with, Madrigal uses a

comment made by one participant about the Matrix and later highlights the resemblance to the

unrealistic world.