Since Facebook introduced algorithms to prioritise what you see on your news feed, it’s generally assumed that posts made by your pals would be shown over, say, promotional posts by company pages. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the case.
Twitter user Caryn Vainio (@Hellchick) posted an incredibly sad story today about a friend who had passed away. She was informed of his death by a mutual friend and was shocked that she hadn’t seen anything from him on Facebook, considering the pair used the platform as a means of staying in touch.
When she checked his page, sure enough, there were statuses he had posted about being hospitalised that never showed up in Vainio’s feed, despite her changing it to display ‘most recent’ posts. The Facebook algorithm had chosen not to show the messages. You can see her entire story below.
For those of you who work in social media, I need to share the story of my friend who died, and I didn’t know because algorithms.
— Caryn Vainio (@Hellchick) December 18, 2017
A friend I’ve known mostly online for 15+ years died this weekend. Our friendship started on an old gaming forum, but continued on Facebook.
— Caryn Vainio (@Hellchick) December 18, 2017
He was part of a group of friends, and we’ve all stayed connected via Facebook. He didn’t post much, but he liked and commented a lot.
— Caryn Vainio (@Hellchick) December 18, 2017
I met him once years ago, and just two months ago he told me he’d love to host me and my family down in Portland when we got down there.
— Caryn Vainio (@Hellchick) December 18, 2017
I found out from a mutual friend on FB that he’d died, and had been hospitalized. I was shocked. I NEVER saw this in my feed. Ever.
— Caryn Vainio (@Hellchick) December 18, 2017
So I flipped to his feed, and sure enough, there’d been a post in November about him being in the hospital. I was never shown this post.
— Caryn Vainio (@Hellchick) December 18, 2017
Now, I’m a meticulous FB feed peruser. I always set it to Most Recent and browse until I see the stuff I saw last time. I keep up.
— Caryn Vainio (@Hellchick) December 18, 2017
Other friends have confirmed that they too never saw his hospital post. So now we’re all horrified. We never knew to reach out.
— Caryn Vainio (@Hellchick) December 18, 2017
And worse, we never commented, because we never saw it. Did he die wondering if we cared? He didn’t know, and we didn’t know.
— Caryn Vainio (@Hellchick) December 18, 2017
All because FB’s algorithm presumably decided that he didn’t post much, so he didn’t warrant enough attention in our feeds.
— Caryn Vainio (@Hellchick) December 18, 2017
So now today not only have I lost a friend, a bunch of us are horrified that we never knew, and we don’t know if he KNEW we didn’t know.
— Caryn Vainio (@Hellchick) December 18, 2017
In the age of online relationships that social media companies claim to facilitate in a positive way, this feels like unacceptable.
— Caryn Vainio (@Hellchick) December 18, 2017
It’s extremely sad that Vainio missed out on a chance to say goodbye to her friend because of an algorithm, but it’s even sadder that her friend, who put his trust in a social media platform to spread the word that he was unwell, potentially died thinking no one cared. I can’t even begin to fathom how that must feel.
It certainly poses the question – how much trust can we really place in the hands of social media? They certainly want us to feel safe sharing our lives with the internet, but if that’s the case, they simply must do better than this.
