Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

by Kyle Chayka

“Platforms have offered us up something that is meant for intimate, connected speech. Then they moderate it in a statistically broad, systematic way,” Gillespie told me. There’s little room for considering the specific nature of a given piece of content, since it lacks context and becomes atomized in the overall feed. That means we have also developed expectations about how the content we post travels online—namely, we most often expect it to travel as far as possible. “People have developed a notion not just that they get to speak, but there’s some expectation of where it’s supposed to go,” Gillespie told me. In other words, we have come to expect algorithmic promotion almost as a right. But perhaps this expectation needs to change, and we need to learn to exist in a digital world without so much automated acceleration. Reaching wide audiences of strangers isn’t a right; it’s a privilege that doesn’t need to be possible for every individual user or post. The word amplification describes algorithmic recommendations’ role in spreading content more widely than it would otherwise travel: like a megaphone, it turns regular speech into a shout. Amplification is at the core of Filterworld’s problems; one format gets amplified above all. Using regulation to target amplification could create more balance in the ecosystem.