#clickwork

Refugee-industrial complex

The real problem here is not the liberal leanings of Facebook’s news curators. If conservative news topics were overlooked, it’s only a symptom of the underlying problem. Facebook wanted to take surges of activity that its algorithms could identify and turn them into news-like headlines. But it treated this as an information processing problem, not an editorial one. They’re “clickworking” the news. Clickwork begins with the recognition that computers are good at some kinds of tasks, and humans others. The answer, it suggests, is to break the task at hand down into components and parcel them out to each accordingly. For Facebook’s trending topics, the algorithm is good at scanning an immense amount of data and identifying surges of activity, but not at giving those surges a name and a coherent description. That is handled by people — in industry parlance, this is the “human computation” part. These identified surges of activities are delivered to a team of curators, each one tasked with following a set of procedures to identify and summarize them. The work is segmented into simple and repetitive tasks, and governed by a set of procedures such that, even though different people are doing it, their output will look the same. In effect, the humans are given tasks that only humans can do, but they are not invited to do them in a human way: they are “programmed” by the modularized work flow and the detailed procedures so that they do the work like computers would. As Lilly Irani put it, clickwork “reorganizes digital workers to fit them both materially and symbolically within existing cultures of new media work.”

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