Anyone who spends a significant amount of time online has experienced the moment when you scroll through a feed and discover that everything in it supports a belief you already held. It’s a familiar outrage. The humor is just right. Even the news appears to be pre-selected and tailored to your current mood. It seems to be serendipitous. It isn’t.
This is how the architecture of contemporary social media is doing just what it was designed to do: keeping you interested, keeping you at ease, and preventing you from coming across anything that actually presents a challenge. In reality, what is referred to as personalization is actually a form of narrowing. Additionally, a growing number of individuals—including researchers, platform critics, and regular users who are worn out by their own introspection—are beginning to question whether there is a better way to arrange the feed.
Although the argument between curation algorithms and chronological feeds has been simmering for years, it now seems more pressing. At a London event last year, historian and author Yuval Noah Harari made the point quite bluntly: in the twentieth century, front page content was determined by newspaper editors and television producers. For better or worse, they influenced public discourse, but at least those choices were made by people with editorial accountability and stated values. These decisions are now being made for billions of people at once by non-human systems built to maximize engagement, which, according to Harari, helps to explain why it’s getting harder to find shared facts.
Curation algorithms are corrosive in the same way that they are highly effective. They operate by identifying what triggers a response, such as a click, a pause, or a share, and then providing more of it. Content that reinforces preexisting beliefs is more widely disseminated than content that challenges them. Anger is effective. It’s not nuance. Over time, the feed subtly reinforces a more limited version of you by gravitating toward the identities and viewpoints that produce the strongest signals, rather than simply reflecting who you are. Users in algorithmically curated environments tend to scroll more quickly and switch between platforms more restlessly, searching for novelty that a deterministic feed increasingly cannot provide, according to researchers studying filter bubbles.
The harm might be more subtle than most people acknowledge. Even someone who thinks of themselves as open-minded may still be consuming a fundamentally biased information diet—not because of intentional dishonesty, but rather because the algorithm identified the stories that the user spent an additional three seconds on. That’s sufficient. A system can determine your identity with just three seconds of hesitation repeated over several months.
A return to chronological feeds—posts that arrive in the order they were published, without relevance ranking, without personalized amplification, and without the invisible hand transforming reality into something more palatable—is the alternative that is being pushed with renewed seriousness. The concept sounds almost charming. It has strong intellectual support as well. A few years ago, author Joan Westenberg made the straightforward argument that social media platforms could once again serve as authentic public squares rather than parallel realities designed for maximum retention if the personalized filtration was completely removed. Because no single system is determining what should be seen at all on behalf of everyone, chronology in this framing restores something akin to shared experience, not because everyone sees the same content.
There are actual issues. Chronological feeds produce their own distortions by favoring accounts that post frequently. In a purely temporal stream, misinformation can spread swiftly. Furthermore, it is difficult to overstate how financially unappealing a chronological feed is for platforms whose business models rely on engagement metrics. The incentive schemes remain unchanged.
Users seem to be losing patience with the deal, though. It’s getting harder to ignore the feeling of being controlled—of having a feed that knows you a bit too well and never quite surprises you. It’s difficult to ignore how much the experience of being online has begun to resemble gazing into an extremely sophisticated mirror, one that pleases you just enough to keep you staring.
