for cars, looking at pictures and movies and liking them; voila, he could enjoy car-related
content in the days to come. “It`s like a dog!” he said. Asking him further if he felt that this
interacted with his personal life and privacy he responded:
“I feel safe on Facebook. Instead of thinking ‘oh, someone is fucking my privacy’ you can
train your Facebook, let them know what you want. I only play movies that I like”.
It is essential not to omit that Dedan, working as a programmer, has a better understanding of
how these functions works than most people have. It was Dedan that first told me how the
algorithms created a “happy place.” It is still interesting how he does not seem to feel that it
interacts with his private life or privacy in general, as this is a common concern in western
parts of the world. When stating that he feels safe on Facebook, he also mentions that he “is
not an interesting person,” and therefore, the government would not be interested in him.
About one month earlier, on one of our weekend trips, we discussed the same theme, privacy.
He then said that: “Facebook reads all messages and that they have computers that recognize
stuff in the chats, this is good if someone is doing something criminal, but scary thought.”
Once more, Dedan said that he was not scared of being watched himself since he is not an
interesting person and that the government has much other stuff to think about. For Dedan,
Facebook is a place he can use to get access to the things that interest him the most through
disciplining his feed. He sees himself as the person in control, not Facebook or the
Government.
It is, however, only Dedan that described doing this intentional disciplining of the feed
amongst my informants. Most do not talk about it, or, from what I experience, even think
much of it. Even so, these algorithms need to be addressed to be able to understand how hate
speech allegedly might spread like wildfire on Facebook. If one interacts with a post
containing a specific utterance, it is likely that the algorithms will show something similar
once more. Further resembling interactions would mean more content of the same character
and so on. This is not limited to the given person’s interaction itself, which means that it is not
as fully controllable as it would seem in Dedan´s view. The algorithms would, in addition to
someone’s activity, collect the popular content amongst the given person’s Facebook-friends,
liked pages and connections, as well as popular content in the area.
The network surrounding the given person is part of what is shown in the feed. It then could
exist, in this case, a combination between the two levels of agency – or performance – Dedan
and his “trained dog” on the one hand, and Facebook´s algorithms on the other. Facebook and
its algorithms are broader than Dedan might understand them as. Without the way the
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