Abby Ohlheiser

As lockdowns, shelter-in-place orders, and social distancing threaten to stretch out into the weeks, months, and even years ahead, there is a scramble to collect, in real time, the overwhelming abundance of information being produced online. Without it, the record of how we lived, how we changed, and how we addressed the global pandemic would be left incomplete and at the mercy of a constantly shifting internet, where even recent history has a tendency to get buried or vanish.

Type “Russia collusion” into a Google search, and the search engine will try to guess the next word you’ll type. The first of those is “delusion.” For Francesca Tripodi, a postdoctoral scholar at Data & Society and assistant professor in sociology at James Madison University, the search results are a powerful tell of a phenomenon she set out to document. The “collusion delusion” results are seeking a conservative audience — which is exactly the demographic that would be more likely to search for the phrase in the first place.

In recent months, Twitter has started to explain why it disagrees with calls for banning President Donald Trump’s account or deleting some of his tweets. 

Facebook has long characterized itself as a neutral platform that simply connects its users to the rest of the world. But over the past several months, the company faced greatly increased scrutiny, including accusations of bias, over the news it shows its users and where that news comes from. The further takeover of the algorithm was Facebook’s response to all that criticism, something that the company appeared to hope would quell accusations of human bias in its news recommendations. Instead, the early high-profile mistakes of the new trending regime only seemed to highlight how much work it still has to do.

In the first weeks of the new Trending bar, Facebook trended conspiracy theories, old news, fake news — including one story from a site that had “Fakingnews” in its domain name — and was generally slow to pick up on major developing news stories (with the very notable exception of its swift pickup of the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie divorce). We documented a lot of that in our pop-up newsletter on Facebook’s trends. Facebook showed us 31 articles each for Yahoo and USA Today through its trending topics — the top amounts for all of the publications we saw — yet they are both lagging behind in overall engagements for the same period.

Facebook hoped that the raw immediacy of live-streaming might help coax its users to share more about their personal lives. On July 6, a woman in the passenger seat of the car where Philando Castile lay dying, shot in the arm by a Minnesota cop during a traffic stop, used Facebook Live to show the world the shooting’s gory aftermath.

hen Facebook introduced Facebook Live, it was likely anticipating safe viral moments like Chewbacca Mom or the Buzzfeed watermelon explosion. Instead, Facebook found that livestreaming is a lot more than that. Like real life, livestreaming can have a light side and a dark side. It also has a long history of use as a powerful medium for accountability. This is what Diamond Reynolds did on July 6. Reynolds’s video disappeared from Facebook the night of July 6, before reappearing with a warning that it showed “graphic” imagery. Facebook later said that the video was temporarily taken down because of a “technical glitch” without explaining further. But the sudden loss of access raises questions about whether Facebook is ready to judge which raw, visceral moments that its users broadcast may stay on the site, and which will go. As Facebook’s users continue to stream their varieties of experience through Live, the company is going to have to make decisions about which of these the world can – or can’t – see, particularly when those experiences contain both graphic imagery and vitally important information. Reynolds’s stream is an example of this, and of its power: it transformed how the story of Castile’s death – and her grieving of his death – is told. Her perspective from inside that car became that of her viewers, and she relied on no one else to tell it.