What Do Media Companies Really Want?

Technology giants like Facebook, LinkedIn and Amazon — along with the data analysts at legacy media companies like Disney and Time Warner — spend their days trying to seduce their audiences by creating ultra-targeted streams of news, television clips, opinions and other pop culture ephemera. When members of that same audience log on to social networks, Hulu accounts, Netflix or Amazon Prime they consume ads, videos and news items that cater to what the algorithms driving those services believe users want.

How Facebook Is Changing the Way Its Users Consume Journalism

Many of the people who read this article will do so because Greg Marra, 26, a Facebook engineer, calculated that it was the kind of thing they might enjoy.

Mr. Marra’s team designs the code that drives Facebook’s News Feed — the stream of updates, photographs, videos and stories that users see. He is also fast becoming one of the most influential people in the news business.

Facebook now has a fifth of the world — about 1.3 billion people — logging on at least monthly. It drives up to 20 percent of traffic to news sites, according to figures from the analytics company SimpleReach. On mobile devices, the fastest-growing source of readers, the percentage is even higher, SimpleReach says, and continues to increase.

Personalization – Northeastern University

Today, many major websites personalize the content that they show to users. Examples include: Google Search, which personalizes search results to try and surface more relevant content; Amazon and Netflix, which personalize product and movie recommendations; and Facebook, which personalizes each user’s news-feed to highlight engaging content. The proliferation of personalization on the Web is driven by the explosion of Big Data that is available about people’s online and offline behavior.

Although there are cases where personalization is beneficial to users, scientists and regulators have become increasingly concerned that personalization may also harm Web users. For example, sociologists and political scientists are concerned that online Filter Bubbles may create “echo chambers” that increase political polarization. Similarly, personalization on e-commerce sites can be used to implement price discrimination.

Given the enormous number of people who rely on the Web, it is imperative that we understand how personalization algorithms are being deployed, and the effect that they have on Web users. Below, you will find links to specific research projects that our group has undertaken to address these issues.

Glenn Greenwald: Why privacy matters

Glenn Greenwald was one of the first reporters to see — and write about — the Edward Snowden files, with their revelations about the United States’ extensive surveillance of private citizens. In this searing talk, Greenwald makes the case for why you need to care about privacy, even if you’re “not doing anything you need to hide.”

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