Co-authored by Nick Lane
This is Part 3 of a three-part series.
It’s well established that what we see on social media can shape the way we think about relationships. What we didn’t know when we began this series was whether social media could have something to do with why so many people are choosing to opt out of dating and relationships altogether. In our first post on this topic, we uncovered differences in the content that men and women were exposed to in their feeds. In our second post, we explored the potential for divisiveness created by the types of relationship misinformation we encountered. Now, we want you to know that you aren’t at the mercy of what your algorithm is showing you. In this final post, we’ll share ways you can gain a new perspective on relationships by breaking out of the algorithmic echo chamber that we’ve described.
Understanding Your Algorithm
An algorithm is a tool. We often forget that. It’s not inherently good or bad. An algorithm is specifically designed to provide an individualized user experience. Regardless of whether it’s positive or negative, an algorithm is simply doing its job by showing you things that capture your attention. It operates by using some combination of collaborative or content-based filtering, which makes recommendations based on the preferences of users similar to you or based on your own past preferences, respectively. The point is that an algorithm rarely shows you content completely at random.
The downside of an algorithm is that it sometimes restricts what a user sees so much that it creates a filter bubble, which can limit exposure to diverse perspectives. When the same type of content is blasted to you on repeat, there is the potential for it to bias your beliefs and make outlier experiences seem more common than what they actually are.
Retraining Your Algorithm
To figure out why certain relationship content keeps being recommended to you, it can help to reflect on what you do online. In one illustrative data science simulation, when a user who consumed mostly sports news suddenly showed an interest in three political news stories, it was enough to change the political content of their feed by 27 percentage points, from 13 percent to 40 percent politics. If you want to change what you see, you have to engage with more of the content you want and less of what you don’t. Here are a few examples of questions you can ask yourself:
- Is the content I’m seeing only showing me the negative behaviors of others in relationships?
- Does this content make me want to put more effort into my relationships, or less?
- Is this content encouraging me to hold adversarial beliefs about someone I haven’t even met yet, like a potential partner or spouse?
- Is the same negative message about relationships being repeated to me ad nauseam?
- Am I having an emotional response to this content or formulating beliefs about relationships based on experiences that are not mine?
When viewing content causes you to relive a bad situation over and over again, it can turn into rumination. And dwelling on an experience doesn’t always create the mental space for perspective, wisdom, or healing. It can also reinforce existing beliefs and may even contribute to polarization through the creation of bias. Here are a few things we learned about how you can break the cycle by retraining your algorithm:
- Every like, comment, and share signals interest. You endorse content by engaging with it, so hit send only on things you want more of.
- A follow is a strong signal. Seek out credible sources and follow people who have built a reputation by debunking relationship myths. Remember: Just because it’s trending doesn’t mean it’s true.
- Hate-watching videos is counterproductive. When you linger on a video or watch to the end, that’s engagement, regardless of whether you liked what you saw. Don’t pause on things you don’t enjoy seeing.
- Your current behavior is telling. People’s interests can change quickly, and your algorithm knows it. What you’ve been watching lately is going to affect what you see, even if it’s dramatically different from what you’ve been drawn to before.
- Be purposeful in seeking out healthy relationship ideologies. Search terms like “good communication habits,” “effective conflict management skills,” and “how to date intentionally” can help guide you in the direction of content that aligns with your values.
What It All Means
Many of us have gone through relationship ups and downs. Wanting to learn from those experiences and share them with others is natural but can also lead us to misinformative content. In this series, we’ve described some ways that the content served up by algorithms can inadvertently influence our own beliefs about dating and relationships. We’ve also invited you to consider the kinds of messages about relationships that keep being repeated to you. We hope this series can be the beginning of a dialogue within ourselves and our relationships about how what we’re consuming on social media might be affecting our own desire for real-world connection.
This post was co-authored by Nick Lane, a health care practitioner interested in the intersection between physical and psychological well-being.
