Imagine if every newspaper came with a mandatory T-shirt. Suddenly, that tabloid you paged through out of curiosity becomes part of your identity. You have to explain to friends that despite being a walking billboard, you don’t actually agree with The Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorials, or think The New York Times is too liberal but still covers the facts. Increasingly, you stick to outlets you unambiguously approve of, reinforcing things you already believe.
This is how Facebook imagines the future of news, and it’s absurd.
Since president-elect Donald Trump’s campaign exposed deep rifts in the American electorate, people have criticized various aspects of the Facebook “filter bubble,” in which an incredibly popular platform surrounds users with content confirming their worldview. Some of the problems with how Facebook sorts and shows news seem like genuine mistakes, and others seem at least malleable. But the issue isn’t just algorithms. It’s a collision between the social interactions that Facebook is designed to simulate, and the information-gathering that it’s now used for. Facebook is a news platform, but its most ubiquitous form of interaction is designed to discourage exploration: the Like.
The most ubiquitous interface element discourages exploration
Liking things is the universal currency of Facebook. The company has flirted with “following” and “subscribing” to celebrities, and you can react to individual posts with sadness or surprise. But in order to regularly see a page’s posts in your feed — the surest way to expose yourself to a range of ideas — you almost invariably have to start with a public stamp of approval.