Can Somebody Please Tell Facebook's Algorithm That Hillary Lost?

Memories...JL

Adrienne LaFrance reports in The Atlantic:

Any given Facebook post is prominent in large part because of how much engagement it has already gotten. So when a friend’s smiling, pro-Clinton voting selfie gets 83 likes, that image might linger high up in your feed for days-despite her subsequent posts about disappointment with the outcome of the election, or another friend’s post about binge-watching Lord of the Rings clips as a post-election coping mechanism, or any other newer updates for that matter.
Hopeful pre-election selfies are still high up in news feeds, even after Clinton’s defeat. Facebook doesn’t rely on chronology or newsworthiness to determine what tops your feed. Any given Facebook post is prominent in large part because of how much engagement it has already gotten. (See also: the writer Katie Notopoulos’s case study involving Facebook and overnight oats.) So when a friend’s smiling, pro-Clinton voting selfie gets 83 likes, that image might linger high up in your feed for days-despite her subsequent posts about disappointment with the outcome of the election, or another friend’s post about binge-watching Lord of the Rings clips as a post-election coping mechanism, or any other newer updates for that matter. (Instagram, too, is a mishmash of pre-election and post-election sentiment this way. Even Twitter, still the most real-timey of social publishing platforms, isn’t strictly chronological anymore either.)
Of course, Facebook isn’t just where people overwhelmingly go to find the news. It’s also where they go to process major events. In my feed today, for instance, you’ll find Dalai Lama quotes and anti-anxiety gifs aplenty.
Among the Clinton supporters I know, there is a palpable sense of despair: I see a friend from high school and her husband wearing all black in protest. I see many, many parents of young children describing the agony of breaking the news of the election to them. I see messages of disbelief, sorrow, and anger. People are scared.
But then there are the smiling ghosts from yesterday. Scroll past one and two more appear. For every status of mourning, there is another image of yesterday’s hope. They are wearing bright colors and big smiles. And I can’t stop looking at them. Partly because they won’t go away. And maybe they shouldn’t. There they are, staring directly into the camera, challenging us all to remember how things almost went differently, promising that someday they will.