Nobody chooses their feed. The app builds it for them, from what they watched, liked, searched for and spent time on.
Today you will build one. With a partner, you will pick an invented person and make the feed the app would make for them. Then you will teach an AI your own taste and watch it build a feed just for you.
A personalised feed shows posts picked for you from what you watched, liked or searched for. This can create a filter bubble, where you see only a small part of what is online.
Personalisation helps you find things you like, but it can also make bias stronger, because other views stop showing up.
The app picks posts using three signals, or clues. They are what you watch to the end, what you come back to, and what people like you also watched. None of them checks whether a post is true or important.
Work with a partner on one device. Choose one of the people below and build the phone screen their app would build for them. The instructions are in the activity below.
Dara, 15, Ennis. He watches every GAA highlight to the end, skips anything over a minute long and follows three gym accounts.
Leila, 14, Dublin. She watches cooking clips and skincare videos, and she saves everything. She has never once opened a news post.
Tomás, 15, Sligo. He watches gaming clips and phone reviews, and he scrolls straight past anyone talking to the camera.
Aoibhe, 14, Cork. She follows animal rescue accounts and horse riding accounts. She also follows two local pages because her sister works at one.
Marek, 15, Galway. He watches football and music from three countries, and he watches long videos that explain how things work all the way to the end.
Your work saves as you go. Your teacher may put some of the feeds on the board later in the lesson.
Build your person's feed
Now it is your turn to train the AI that picks the videos. In the activity below, it learns your taste from every tap and builds a feed of 20 videos just for you. The videos are made up, and nothing is saved.
- Like the cards you would actually watch, and skip the rest. Rate at least eight cards. If you are sharing a device, teach it the taste of the person you built a feed for.
- Press Build my For You page. Go through your feed: like what you enjoy, and press Next to skip.
- After every tap, look at the bars that show the chance of each topic. Which topic is growing, and which is fading out?
- When your feed ends, talk through the Think about it questions with your partner. Then name one thing the feed got right.
Build Your For You Page
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