Flash News

NAMES/ 25-year-old man kills neighbor in Rrogozhina

"Albania is not for sale", the walls of the Prime Minister's Office are 'dressed' with the protesters' messages

Video/ Marjana Koçeku leaves the SP and joins the protest against Rama

"We are the ones who sacrificed for the families... that you forgot", the strong message of the diaspora from the protest

Albanian diaspora joins the march, the largest protest against Rama is expected today

E-TJERA

It wasn't the algorithm that caused the anger, but the anger that outpaced the algorithm.

Politiko 2026-06-20 21:25:39

It wasn't the algorithm that caused the anger, but the anger that outpaced

If the vast world of social media could be described in a few words, it would be more or less this: Facebook and Instagram-type media, which are used more by young and middle-aged Albanians, try to keep people on the go as long as possible, by giving them the information that Facebook assumes they are looking for, assumptions based on information collected from user behavior. This business model has led Facebook to acquire content offered for free by users, mainly through personal accounts, and sell the public's attention attracted by this information to advertisers who advertise mainly from pages.

Facebook and Instagram appear to use a fluctuating combination of their interest in content that users give away for free, and their interest in selling ads, to determine the visibility of each post.

Posts that other users are interested in are shown to more people. Posts that are not, the poster will have to pay for advertising in order for the message to be distributed. Advertising, in turn, works like a stock exchange. If there is a lot of demand for advertising, as happens in election campaigns in Albania, the price increases. Consequently, when you are a small business that wants to advertise something during an election in Albania, you may notice how the cost of reaching some potential buyers doubles or triples because the flood of campaign money practically drives you out of the market.

Various groups, including governments, use coordinated behavior to trick the algorithm into thinking that a particular post is of high interest. As at least one US investigation has noted, Facebook has no major concerns about this coordinated behavior, even though it officially considers it illegal. The reason is that the behavior, coordinated or otherwise, serves Facebook to keep more users online for longer.

Those with a lot of resources at their disposal, such as, for example, Prime Minister Edi Rama, try to dominate, and in many cases succeed in dominating, social media through a phenomenon that experts know as saturation. While a critic of the government can make one post, the government has entire armies of propagandists who are able to produce an enormous volume of materials, which, having higher graphic quality, and using enormous financial resources, manage to dominate social media while leaving critical voices isolated in narrow courtyards.

The methods that Facebook and other social networks use to keep users, individuals and advertisers, addicted to themselves have been described by experts as methods borrowed from the gambling industry and have raised concerns that they have created addiction in people. In the gambling industry, the unit of measurement of success is not how much money the gambler has spent in the casino, but how many hours he has spent playing. The time spent in the game is the indicator of success. The money earned is a consequence of this and not the primary objective. The same happens with Facebook, whose interest is to keep people on the platform as long as possible.

Algorithms have created “islands” or “inner courtyards” in which certain groups of users interact with each other, while the algorithm removes any information that the group has not expressed interest in. This is how Facebook has operated for years, creating “echo chambers” or isolated groups of people who circle around each other without looking further.

But on May 31, this system seemed to break down. The avalanche of citizen reactions to the ugly incident of the rape and kidnapping of a citizen by private security guards in Zvërnec was the origin of all this. If you remember, the incident in Zvërnec took place on May 30, a Saturday, and by Sunday, when some citizens in Tirana called for a protest attended by thousands of people, the Facebook algorithm was shaken, not because there was any conspiracy, not because there was any “hybrid war,” but because, unfortunately for the government, citizens were so angry that the reaction on social networks broke the walls of traditional courtyards, overcame islands of isolation or echo chambers, and spilled onto the “Martyrs of the Nation” boulevard.

While traditional media fell silent, citizens noticed the face of the oligarchy: control of the traditional media sphere through ignoring real news and bombardment with spectacle shows and saturation of social media by the government.

Citizen anger was of course not artificially created by the algorithm or any false information. Citizen anger simply reached its breaking point with the incident in Zvërnec. It was anger that broke the algorithm, not the algorithm that caused the anger./ BIRN

Latest news