Feeds will open up to new user-determined filters

“After this year’s fake news and Russian micro-targeting fiascos, Facebook and others will be forced to loosen their grip over our algorithmically determined timelines to other alternatives if they want to keep our attention.”

We’ll start filtering our feeds in new ways. After this year’s fake news and Russian micro-targeting fiascos, Facebook and others will be forced to loosen their grip over our algorithmically determined timelines to other alternatives if they want to keep our attention.

Users will be able to subscribe to filters, trusted curators who overlay onto the standard feed-filtering algorithms. Picture user interfaces with new levers for control. What’s the balance between news articles and friend updates you want in your feed this week? Want to filter out all Trump news for the day? Stop showing my prankster videos. Subscribe to only show me AP-verified news in my feed.

The MIT Media Lab’s Center for Civic Media has been experimenting with what the feed might look like with users in control. Their Gobo project allows users to sign in with their existing social accounts and presents filter sliders to directly tweak the outputs of the feed, and even shows you what was taken out with those filters applied. Far from a black box, this is the closest we’ve come to being able to express our filtering intentions and preferences outright, instead of allowing them to be inferred and assumed from all our previous behaviors.

Imagine being able to mute all men in your feed for just a few hours at a time! Or cutting back on “rudeness” or sensationalism in your feed.

For the record, I made a similar argument last year, but the crises of 2017 have opened up new opportunities in user demand and platform remediation efforts.

If Facebook continues to assiduously avoid being a “media company,” it will have to start letting do their vetting and filtering for them. Curation by an open market of trusted algorithms, rather than one engineered expressly to keep you on the site longer will lead to better experiences and perhaps even increased user literacy around media consumption in our personalized feeds.

Sara M. Watson is a technology critic and affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen   The Snapchat scenario and the risk of more closed platforms

David Skok   Finding an information-life balance

Juliette De Maeyer   A responsible press criticism

Pia Frey   Address users as individuals

Alastair Coote   The year of self-improvement

Niketa Patel   Live journalism comes of age

Michelle Ferrier   The year of the great reckoning

Rodney Gibbs   Tech workers turn to journalism

Carrie Brown-Smith   Transparency finally takes off

Sarah Marshall   Loyalty as the key performance indicator

Nushin Rashidian   Publishers seek ad dollar alternatives

Mira Lowe   The year of the local watchdog

Corey Ford   The empire strikes back

Mary Meehan   Real lives are at stake in rural areas

Ray Soto   VR reaches the next level

Sally Lehrman   Trust comes first

Adam Thomas   Sharing is caring: The year of the mentor

Alice Antheaume   Are you fluent in AI?

Evie Nagy   Pivot to mobile video frustration

Rachel Davis Mersey   AI, with real smarts

Errin Haines   At the ballot, it’s time to count black women

Matt Boggie   The intellectual equivalent of the Dead Sea

Charo Henríquez   Training is an investment, not an expense

Julia Beizer   A longer view on the pivot

Sam Sanders   Shine the light on ourselves

Jamie Mottram   From pageviews to t-shirts

Caitlin Thompson   Podcasting models mature and diversify

Alfred Hermida   Going beyond mobile-first

Sam Ford   The year of investing in processes

Daniel Trielli   The rich get richer, the poor scramble

Richard J. Tofel   The platforms’ power demands more reporters’ attention

Emily Goligoski   Looking beyond news for inspiration

Corey Johnson   The pro-fact resistance

Julia B. Chan   Looking for loyalty in all the right places

Marcela Donini and Thiago Herdy   Collaboration is the way forward for Brazilian journalism

Francesco Marconi   The year of machine-to-machine journalism

Alexios Mantzarlis   Moving fake news research out of the lab

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Publishing less to give readers more

Imaeyen Ibanga   Longform video leads the way

Lam Thuy Vo   Breaking free from the tyranny of the loudest

Kim Fox   Audience teams diversify their approach

Tanya Cordrey   Finally, the seeds of radical reinvention

Matt DeRienzo   A recession, then a collapse

L. Gordon Crovitz   Serving readers over advertisers

Craig Newmark   Working together toward sustainable solutions

Kawandeep Virdee   Zines had it right all along

Jim Brady   With the people, not just of the people

Felix Salmon   Covering bitcoin while owning bitcoin

Bill Keller   A growing turn to philanthropy

Marie Gilot   No assholes allowed

Rodney Benson   Better, less read, and less trusted

Dannagal G. Young   Stop covering politics as a game

Mariana Moura Santos   Think local, act global

Hossein Derakhshan   Television has won

Justin Kosslyn   The year journalists become digital security experts

Rick Berke   Value is the watchword

Jennifer Coogan   The future is female

Tamar Charney   We get serious about algorithms

Matt Thompson   Here come the attention managers

Cindy Royal   Your journalism curriculum is obsolete

Jennifer Brandel and Mónica Guzmán   The editorial meeting of the future

Michael Kuntz   The only pivot that might work

Amie Ferris-Rotman   More female reporters abroad (please)

Jared Newman   Venture funding and digital news don’t mix

Damon Krukowski   Reviving the alt-weekly soul

Miguel Castro   The arrival of the impact producer

Andrew Ramsammy   The year ownership mattered

C.W. Anderson   The social media apocalypse

Almar Latour   Conquering calm

P. Kim Bui   The reckoning is only beginning

Dheerja Kaur   Fun with subscription products

Kelsey Proud   No, no, no

Mike Caulfield   Refactoring media literacy for the networked age

Monique Judge   Letting black women tell their own stories

Jarrod Dicker   Honesty in advertising

Yvonne Leow   The rise of video messaging

Claire Wardle   Disinformation gets worse

Amy King   Let’s amplify visual voice

Rubina Madan Fillion   Unlocking the potential of AI

Jake Levine   The return to now

Mary Walter-Brown   Show a little vulnerability

John Keefe   Scooped by AI

Lucas Graves   From algorithms to institutions

Neha Gandhi   Filler killers

Raju Narisetti   Mirror, mirror on the wall

Ståle Grut   Reclaiming audience interaction from social networks

Taylor Lorenz   Social and media will split

Mariano Blejman   News games rule

Debra Adams Simmons   And a woman shall lead them

Eric Ulken   The year local publishers get smart(er) about change

Caitria O'Neill   The new court of public opinion

Sara M. Watson   Feeds will open up to new user-determined filters

Basile Simon   We need better career paths for news nerds

Andrew Losowsky   The year of resilience

Kathleen McElroy   Building a news video experience native to mobile

Borja Echevarría   TV goes digital, digital goes TV

Kinsey Wilson   Facebook and Google: Help out or pay up

Eric Nuzum   Beyond the narrative arc

Laura E. Davis   Writing answers before you know the question

Federica Cherubini   The rise of bridge roles in news organizations

Joanne McNeil   Gatekeeping the gatekeepers

Joanne Lipman   Journalists inventing revenue streams

Jennifer Choi   Standing up for us and for each other

Steve Grove   The midterms are an opportunity

Juleyka Lantigua-Williams   Women of color will reclaim and monetize our time

Christopher Meighan   Passive partnership is in the rearview

Ariana Tobin   Too tired to tap

Aron Pilhofer   We can’t leave the business to the business side any more

Matt Carlson   Attacks on the press will get worse

Paul Ford   Go global

Nathalie Malinarich   Peak push

Nancy Watzman   Know thy TV

Doris Truong   Computer vision vs. the Internet vigilantes

José Zamora   Revenue-first journalism

Mandy Velez   texting is lit rn, fam

Amy Webb   Listen to weak signals

Kyle Ellis   Let’s build our way out of this

Jacqui Cheng   Retailers move into content

Usha Sahay   Wallets get opened

Umbreen Bhatti   The trust problem isn’t new

Michelle Garcia   Navigating journalistic transparency

Emma Carew Grovum   Newsroom culture becomes a priority

Vanessa K. DeLuca   Women’s voices take center stage

Kristen Muller   The year of the voter

Cristina Wilson   The year of the Instagram Story

Lanre Akinola   Making noise is not a strategy

Dan Shanoff   You down with OTT? (Yeah, DTC)

Cory Haik   Suffering from realness, pivoting to impact

Jim Moroney   Newspapers have to be good enough for readers to pay for

Ruth Palmer   Risks will grow for news subjects — especially minorities

Helen Havlak   Keywords, not publishers, power the world’s biggest feeds

Luke O'Neil   The end is already here

S. Mitra Kalita   The arc of news and audience

Renée Kaplan   The year of quiet adjustments (shhh)

Raney Aronson-Rath   Transparency is the antidote to fake news

Monika Bauerlein   The firehose of falsehood

Burt Herman   Things get real

Will Sommer   The year local media gets conservative

Hannah Cassius   The year of the echo-chamber escapists

Elizabeth Jensen   Show your work

Mario García   Storytelling finally adapts to mobile

Frédéric Filloux   External forces

Jassim Ahmad   Thriving on change

Dan Newman   A return to trust

Andrew Haeg   The year journalists become relationship builders

Joyce Barnathan   It will be harder to bury the news

Tanzina Vega   It’s time for media companies to #PassTheMic

Nicholas Quah   Stop talking trash about young people

Pablo Boczkowski   The rise of skeptical reading

Sue Schardt   Jump the niche

Vivian Schiller   Pivot to tomorrow

An Xiao Mina   Memes and visuals come to the fore

Mi-Ai Parrish   Blockchain and trust

Tim Carmody   Watch out for Spotify

Trushar Barot   The Jio-fication of India

Rachel Schallom   Better design helps differentiate opinion and news

Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer   Skepticism and narcissism

Nikki Usher   The year of The Washington Post

Carlos Martínez de la Serna   The new journalism commons

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Seeking trust in fragmented spaces

Brian Lam   Sketchy ethics around product reviews

Jesse Holcomb   Information disorder, coming to a congressional district near you

Manoush Zomorodi   Self-help as a publishing strategy

Molly de Aguiar   Good journalism won’t be enough

Edward Roussel   Eyes, ears, and brains

Alan Soon   The rise of start of psychographic, micro-targeted media

Millie Tran and Stine Bauer Dahlberg   (Hint: It’s about your brand)

Nicholas Diakopoulos   Fortifying social media from automated inauthenticity

Susie Banikarim   R.I.P. Pivot to Video (2017–2017)

Sydette Harry   Listen to your corner and watch for the hook

Heather Bryant   Building the ecosystems for collaboration

Zizi Papacharissi   Women come back

Tracie Powell   The muting of underserved voices

Pete Brown   Push alerts, personalized

Jessica Parker Gilbert   Design connects storytelling and strategy

Feli Sánchez   The year for guerrilla user research