Making it easier to unfollow on social media – ‘Demetrication’
The social media giants have recognised that what we might call the ‘ following’ metrics – number of likes, shares, retweets, etc. – are having a negative effect on public discourse.
In a recent article in the December issue of The Atlantic, Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell propose that one way to reduce the harms of social media is ‘demetrication’, or “reducing the frequency and intensity of public performance”. The instinct to follow others’ posts is boosted in two ways through popularity measures –
1. The algorithm uses the number of clicks and likes as a proxy for relevance and importance, so will feed those bits of content higher up into your social media feed. The more other people like something the more likely you are to see it. The algorithms aren’t there to curate a range of diverse views but to increase the chance that you click and view that content.
2. Our psychological bias toward ‘social proof’ – believing that if others see something as valuable then we will too. This is a technique used in advertising – so when Hertz used to advertise itself as ‘#1 in car rentals’, it was saying that most other people chose Hertz, so you should too.
So the Unfollow team sees the trend toward hiding the number of likes as a great step in the right direction, even if that data is still used in the algorithm that feeds the content to you, but reducing the social proof bias, it increases that chances that you will click on more diverse content, and be more skeptical of what is read.
Sometimes the less we know about what others’ think (particularly the ‘crowd’ of other social media users), the more independent our thinking, the more we can Unfollow the preferences of others.
So, let’s eliminate vanity metrics for more independent thinking.