Digital Ethics; Reading Annotation Journal, Response 1.1

In watching the talk from Gerd Leonhard, it struck me when he seemingly surmises that vast amounts of information are being controlled by a select few people. While I feel that he is right and logically justified in questioning the appropriateness of the situation, I feel it is misrepresented for the sake of dramatic flair. The algorithm that runs the news feed on facebook and other social media platforms is tailored to the responses of the user. The news feed is a reflection of their personal preferences and is based upon their historical input, and so the ethics of the programmers is fairly irrelevant in that context. I would be far more concerned about the ethics of the people relying upon social media for news content knowing that content produced by National Vanguard, Stormfront,the Proud Boys, and other similar groups have seen much higher activity (and drawn more interest)over the last 5 years in large part due to their visibility on social media. Perhaps the algorithm needs to be updated with an option to suggest the user can only spend 20 minutes a day on any SM platform.