Friday, 29 Mar 2024

How’d you find me, Whitney Port? The mystery of Facebook’s algorithm finally getting me right

How’d you find me, Whitney Port? The mystery of Facebook’s algorithm finally getting me right


How’d you find me, Whitney Port? The mystery of Facebook’s algorithm finally getting me right

Whitney Port and her husband Tim Rosenman were surprised when I said I first found their video series on Facebook. Or rather, that it found me.

I wasn't expecting it myself. Though I mainly use Facebook to keep in touch with family all over the world, I occasionally find myself scrolling through an increasingly chaotic feed. It was there, in the abyss of poorly-produced, off-kilter videos that Port and Rosenman's reaction series - where they watch and comment on episodes of the MTV hit reality show and my high school-favorite, The Hills - somehow found me.

Episodes of Port and Rosenman's Facebook show, which are usually 25 minutes, were mysteriously mixed in with the peculiar collection of videos now typical of my feed. The mystery was I don't follow Port's Facebook page and have never liked or engaged with The Hills content. And videos suggested to me usually have nothing to do with my interests. Suffice to say, I didn't expect the Facebook algorithm to surface a years-old era of reality TV I once obsessed over.

With little transparency into how Facebook makes decisions about what to suggest to me, every new episode of Reacting to the Hills pushed to the top of my Facebook feed left me wondering: How'd you find me, Whitney Port? Was it a fluke, or is the algorithm getting better?

Facebook doesn't get me: My feed is overwhelmingly a confusing array of scripted videos of "pranks" and scenarios such as "she POISONS him on their wedding night". It's mostly a nuisance.

While I spend most of my reporting unveiling the nefarious ways ad and data tracking can harm you, I loathe to admit it ended up being a nice surprise to be targeted by the algorithm with something I genuinely liked.

For those of you who weren't avid consumers of the early-aughts MTV reality show universe, the show's name (or Port's) might not ring a bell. Its perhaps better-known predecessor, Laguna Beach, followed rich high schoolers in Orange county until one of the protagonists, Lauren Conrad, moved to Los Angeles for an internship. Thus began the multi-season spin-off, The Hills, where we eventually met Port. Now an author and fashion designer, Port was introduced as Conrad's level-headed and hard-working co-intern. As fans of The Hills might remember, she is the girl who famously did go to Paris. (Kind of.) Rosenman, for his part, is a TV producer, who met Port while working on The City, her Hills-spin-off set in New York, and whose resume also includes work on The X Factor.

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