fbTREX empowers users to monitor their information diet
Our information diet is increasingly determined by personalisation algorithms. We should have a right to know whether the information we are being fed truly nourishes our own minds and societies.
It has become evident in recent years that Facebook no longer offers us a complete or balanced information diet. For instance, if you have hundreds of connections on Facebook, yet are repeatedly updates from only 30 friends, you should have a right to know that Facebook is restricting your information diet, and why.
Facebook’s personalisation algorithms have an impact on our lifestyles, priorities, moods, and opinions, yet we are prohibited from understand their functioning and objectives. This problem is compounded by Facebook’s massive network effect – suggestions to simply “delete Facebook” are impractical when this leads to social isolation.
We should instead consciously build our own algorithms, but not everyone has the knowledge or skills to do so alone. That’s where fbTREX comes in.
With fbTREX, we can better monitor our information diets, and get insights into how they present to us different realities. Who is informing us, and about what topics? Are we being provided with misleading information or deceptive advertising?
Promoting algorithmic diversity and our right to pick our own algorithms is a primary goal for fbTREX. We are creating a community to share, compare, improve, remix, and critique algorithms, as autonomous and informed individuals deciding what kind of information diet is most appropriate for ourselves at any given time, and exploring potentially healthier alternatives for social interaction.
fbTREX offers two open technology solutions to this end: A browser extension, which produces a copy of the public stories in our news feeds by extracting metadata from Facebook’s HTML elements. This data is then served up in a webapp as a persistent record of our own news feeds with menus to monitor our information diet in a visual and accessible manner, enabling us to rewind our news feeds and track personal trends, like what types of information we are consuming, which friends and networks influence us most, whether our interactions are fruitful, the amount of time we spend on Facebook, and then to compare this with friends.
We hope that you will join our digital evidence-gathering community and participate in our efforts to better understand what information the Facebook algorithm is feeding us. The more our community grows, the better we will be able to understand the divergent information diets that Facebook imposes on us.
Install the fbTREX browser extension
Available in both of the following:
:heavy_exclamation_mark: We should probably have graphic links.
Privacy
fbTREX prioritises the protection of personal data. Access to the full fbTREX dataset is strictly limited to researchers analysing collective phenomena in the public interest. We are asking individuals only to share some of the public data that Facebook provides them – the goal is to study social media, not the subjects participating. Still, this information can contain a lot of personally identifying information (PII), so fbTREX’s ethical policy imposes the following limits:
- We will collect only the information that Facebook provides to you in your news feed
- We will collect only posts marked as public. We will never collect posts marked for friends only.
- You have full control over your data, and may delete it at any time.
- No one will have access to your data unless you expressly grant them access. You will have to opt-in to any third-party, including research groups, that you may want to interact with.
- All research conducted must strictly aim at understanding social phenomena and algorithmic influence, you will never be the subject or object of any study.
CTA
First part: Donate your digital body to science
Second part: Install the fbTREX browser extension today!