With New App, Instagram's Co-Founders Aspire to Gatekeep the News
Kristin Snyder is dot.LA's 2022/23 Editorial Fellow. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
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Instagram might be in its flop era, but never fear: Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the creative minds behind the photo-sharing app, are back with Artifact—an algorithm-driven news app.
Like TikTok, users can scroll through AI-recommended articles from various news publishers. And like TikTok, the more you engage with these posts, the more the app will push related articles into your feed. It also features a separate feed of articles shared by friends with the option to discuss posts in direct messages. The duo must have figured that since every other social media app has undergone TikTokification, why not apply the concept to a distribution platform for the news.
Now, you might be asking yourself, aren’t people already tired of the neverending news cycle? To which I would say, probably, yes. But never mind the demand. What’s actually interesting about Artifact is the curation element. Consider what Systrom told The Verge earlier this week about how the company plans to exercise its own judgment with regard to which publications belong on the app and which don’t: “One of the issues with technology recently has been a lot of these companies’ unwillingness to make subjective judgments in the name of quality and progress for humanity.”
Though Systrom makes it clear that left and right-leaning news outlets will be on Artifact, and the platform will remove content that doesn’t meet its editorial standards or contains falsehoods, it leaves me wondering, who gets to make these “subjective judgments” and what are the editorial standard?
It’s not like other social media platforms haven’t made similar decisions. TikTok has admitted to boosting certain videos to make them go viral. It’s users also often complain about being shadowbanned, which means their posts aren’t making it into the For You Page.
The Twitter Files opened up a whole can of worms about the site silencing certain users in favor of others, though it failed to mention if said users were violating community guidelines. Both platforms have been accused of suppressing content related to protests. Facebook has faced criticism for its algorithm changes that allegedly reduced the visibility of left-leaning news sites. And of course, all three platforms remove users who break their various community guidelines. (Though post-Elon Musk Twitter has reinstated many people’s accounts, to wide criticism).
So what makes Systrom’s point about news judgement any different? Simple, he’s saying out loud what these other news distribution platforms have been doing for years.
That said, being transparent about its practices doesn’t negate the inherent flaws of Artifact’s approach. It’s one thing for a social media platform to suppress content. It’s another thing for what is ostensibly a news organization—Artifact is presenting itself as the future of news feeds—to do so.
That brings us to its editorial standards, of which Artifact has revealed little. How exactly will the platform’s AI determine what is newsworthy? What we do know is that a handful of people in Silicon Valley who are developing this AI software will be trusted to make these decisions. A group of people, I might add, with a very limited perspective.
Not to mention, we’ve seen the way an algorithm has already pushed people toward committing real-life acts of violence, as was the case in last year’s shooting in Buffalo. And though any AI-driven news feed is ostensibly designed to curb this phenomenon, there’s no evidence to suggest that it will.
Perhaps this is just the latest example that there is no good way to have an algorithmic news feed. At the very least, it emphasizes the fact that not everything needs to be TikTok.
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Kristin Snyder is dot.LA's 2022/23 Editorial Fellow. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
