Have you ever thought about the reasons you're addicted to your phone? Have you ever considered how even when you don't do anything your apps know the things you want? The culprit behind those are recommender systems, and here's how they work and why we need to start regulating them.

Have you ever sat down to watch something and gotten hooked by the 1st video? Have you ever doom scrolled  through reels even though you need to do something but the content is too good? Have you ever seen a post so awful and stupid you don’t know how the poster could even come up with it? Well, think about why you see that or why you get hooked to those kinds of videos and habits. Easy answer, algorithms.

To catch up, an algorithm is just a list of instructions a computer has to follow to achieve something. In this context though algorithms will refer to the different recommender algorithms (or systems)  different social media platforms use . I believe these algorithms should be modified or remade so that people like you and me spend less time looking at our phones.

Filter Bubbles

Starting with filter bubbles, these are algorithms that narrow the content you get on social media based on what you engage and interact with online. It considers the things you watch and like more than others; even things like where your mouse is on the page is tracked and considered in these algorithms (Singer, 2022). But what’s so bad about this? Won't users be better off getting things they are interested in? Yes, getting recommended things you like isn’t inherently a bad thing but it can quickly cause negative side effects such as political polarization, extremism, and promote the spread of mis and dis-information because of the narrow content a user receives (Tucker, 2023).

Also take TikTok’s algorithm, which has a “secret” algorithm that is much more powerful and detects a person’s interest much faster (Singer, 2022). These algorithms attempt to keep you on your screen by making you as unaware of your screen time as possible (Chaudhry et. al., 2022).

In my Opinion, these algorithms cannot continue like this. There should be a push to prevent algorithms from creating “bubbles” that negatively impact our behaviour and screen time. Companies and social media platforms should work to minimize the creation of bubbles in their algorithms, diversify content, promote screen time awareness, and ensure the promotion of different viewpoints and perspectives when it comes to social and political issues.

ー By Hans Rafael Oral of HumanOS