Monday Briefing: Social media

Social media’s early days were characterised by feeds displaying the posts of people you followed, and little else. Two decades ago, however, Facebook changed that with the introduction of its algorithmically driven News Feed. 

With the introduction of the algorithm, Facebook and other social media platforms like Twitter (now X), Snapchat and, more recently, TikTok, began delivering content to their users’ feeds generated by a large number of data points, including how long they spent looking at a post, what other people were posting, and other behavioural cues.