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.
