So much of our lives is mediated by algorithms, and we talk about them like we actually know much about them. In reality, we don’t know nearly enough. michellem_sc reports
Photo-Illustration: by the Cut; Photos Getty Images Emely Betancourt would rather show you her Notes app before handing over access to her TikTok For You Page. It’s too eerily accurate a virtual mirror, she tells me, one that took hours of scrolling to create. The For You Page is TikTok’s primary feed. At first, it shows you its most palatable offerings: videos with millions of likes, celebrities, Charli D’Amelio — milquetoast, likable content.
Exactly what that data counts for and how it’s used to offer us everything from TikToks to dating prospects is proprietary information that’s kept secret from us. And it doesn’t help that we’re only just becoming aware of the algorithms that shape and mold our digital worlds. Congress and the relevant regulating bodies, like the FTC, have recently begun honing in on commercial algorithms, which they’ve deemed as having too great an impact to go totally unregulated.
Algorithmically curated feeds like TikTok’s — and even ones like Spotify’s and Tinder’s — can connect us with people and ideas that expand our worlds and minds while also making us feel more seen and less alone. But they can also make us feel really alienated, misunderstood, and commodified when they use our own data to show a warped version of ourselves.
The stakes are even higher for the algorithms on dating apps. When those algorithms determine whom you see and whom you’re shown to, they can easily start to feel like an authority on whom we should be attracted to and who should be attracted to us. On top of that, Sullivan Facknitz says, Tinder encourages quick-reaction swipes, and they tend to match with what they call their “impulse type,” the dating-app equivalent to the checkout counter’s candy selection: the familiar type they’ve already dated, and it didn’t work out, which is why they’re using Tinder in the first place. Instead of “meeting someone new,” they’re stuck in an unsatisfying, harmful even, swipe-right loop.
It’d be totally naïve to trust that the companies behind these algorithms have our best interests at heart. TikTok’s main source of revenue is ad sales, and we learned from a recent New York Times column headlined “How TikTok Reads Your Mind” that “the app wants to keep you there as long as possible.
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