Late last month, Klout altered its ranking algorithm. The Twitter canaries promptly launched into alarm mode, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth. An #OccupyKlout movement even sprang up on Twitter.

The reaction pointed out three significant shifts now occurring in social media. 

If you’ve been in the habit of checking your Klout, you likely saw a change in your score last month. If you had Klout anywhere above, oh, 55 or so, you may have seen a drop. The system ranks out of an ostensible 100, but it grades on what my undergraduate professors affectionately called “the British system”: Basically, nobody except a superstar gets higher than 75. Justin Bieber, King of Klout, hovers close to 100. Ellen DeGeneres, that teacher’s pet, has an 87. Poor Jon Stewart only scores 73.

Klout had suggested before the shift that the majority of users would see their score stay the same or go down, but a straw poll of the canaries tweeting out sturm und drang on my Twitter feed on Oct. 27 suggests that the people clipped hardest by the new algorithm were the bigger fish in the non-celebrity seas, the ones who’d actually noticed they had Klout.

Talking about Klout scores to a non-Klout-using audience sounds a bit ridiculous. Mind you, so did talking about Twitter in 2007. In the academic presentations I give, mentioning Klout is akin to bragging about the high score I got in Super Mario Brothers back in 1993. Except that unlike Super Mario, Klout and its ilk — the increasingly complex measurements of influence known as metrics — are poised for real-world impact far beyond social media. Like Twitter.

When Klout emerged, however, in 2008, it was something new. It was one of the first tools to measure both reach — how many people you influence — and scale — how much you influence them. Klout’s algorithms also take into account the influence of those you influence. Meaning, on the surface, if you engage with leaders in your community or little corner of the Internet, you yourself are more likely to exert leadership influence.

On Babble.com, the day of the algorithm shift, Cecily Kellogg wrote, “Whether we love or hate Klout, the brands and agencies we work with utilize Klout scores to make determinations about our perceived value, so this is an issue important to us.”

It should be an important issue to anyone using social media. Unless, of course, you believe in a world where Justin Bieber is actually the most influential human alive.

What Klout is good for is giving people a reflective surface on which to see their own social media activities and interactions, relative to themselves and the context of their communities. Klout is good for letting you know whether you’re succeeding in your efforts to improve: It is not and cannot be a measure of success.

The story in the earlier article was that our sprawling intelligence and national security apparatus was caught off-guard by social media-fueled uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, and that they were going to take steps to be better prepared in the future.

DHS Undersecretary Caryn Wagner said the department was still trying to figure out how to use Twitter and Facebook information for law enforcement purposes. And they seem to be starting completely from scratch:

Wagner said the department is establishing guidelines on gleaning information from sites such as Twitter and Facebook for law enforcement purposes. Wagner says those protocols are being developed under strict laws meant to prevent spying on U.S. citizens and protect privacy, including rules dictating the length of time the information can be stored and differences between domestic and international surveillance.

(Hah, “strict laws meant to prevent spying on U.S. citizens.”) (Hah also at the idea that the laws would be respected even if they were strict.)

Speaking of international surveillance, there’s a government agency that is already on top of this Twitter-monitoring thing. The CIA has “several hundred analysts” (we are not allowed to know precisely how many) reading and translating social media content from all over the globe, for all sorts of reasons. And according to the CIA, these CIA analysts are totally cool, like the goth hacker lady in those books you like:

The most successful analysts, Naquin said, are something like the heroine of the crime novel “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” a quirky, irreverent computer hacker who “knows how to find stuff other people don’t know exists.”

Sure, translating Twitter messages from Urdu in order to gauge anti-American sentiment in Pakistan is basically the same thing as solving mysteries with hacking.

It’s not mentioned how the CIA’s social media department avoids “monitoring” the Internet behavior of Americans, which would be a violation of the agency’s charter. The reason that’s not mentioned is probably because they don’t avoid it.

What seems likely is that there are multiple government organizations monitoring your social media usage — the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the NYPD — even if they’re not coordinating their efforts. And sifting through and analyzing publicly posted information is just one piece of the monitoring. What I’m interested to learn is how much ostensibly “private” information — like real names and private messages and locations — these agencies are obtaining, and the means by which they’re obtaining it.

[Via Josh Sternberg]

Chomsky, of course, is a left-wing icon. As an accomplished linguist, prominent political activist and perhaps one of the most important public intellectuals of the last half-century, people pay attention to what he has to say, especially since he has been so pointed in critiquing mainstream media. But is Chomsky himself “crowding out” social media at the expense of voices that ought to be heard?

Back in March, Chomsky did an off-the-cuff interview with a D.C. “scene” blog where he spoke about many things, from familiar political and linguistic topics to the more earthy subjects of baseball cards, Bad Religion and WikiLeaks. It was his comments about new communication technologies — which he admits he doesn’t even use — that most caught my attention.

“Text messaging, Twitter, that sort of thing […] is extremely rapid, very shallow communication,” he said to interviewer Jeff Jetton. Chomsky said. “[I] think it erodes normal human relations. It makes them more superficial, shallow, evanescent.” Chomsky expanded on this point in another interview last December with Figure/Ground Communication, a site devoted to technology and society.

“Well, let’s take, say, Twitter,” he said. “It requires a very brief, concise form of thought and so on that tends toward superficiality and draws people away from real serious communication […] It is not a medium of a serious interchange.”

Maybe I should not read too much into these statements, but “off-the-cuff” remarks often reveal much more than we might assume. They illuminate Chomsky’s larger view of media and, most importantly, highlight the larger trend of established first-world intellectuals dismissing digital communications as less deep or worthwhile than the means of communication that they prefer.

Chomsky has a long (and, I think, mostly terrific) history of criticizing the shallowness of media. His 1997 essay, “What Makes the Mainstream Media Mainstream,” is a classic as is his seminal work “Manufacturing Consent.” His argument, which is anything but shallow, has been that the few control media content and seduce people into believing what they would not otherwise.

Today, of course, the top-down media Chomsky attacked is often said to be in “crisis” because of a new, more social and participatory media environment. Some tech-utopians say this trend has provided a voice to the masses and fueled social revolutions across the globe. Other tech-dystopians view social media as just another venture-capital funded way of exploiting people under the guise of empowerment. But in the world of Chomsky this important debate is instead undercut by the view that communication on digital media is inherently “shallow.”

To be fair, this is not Chomsky’s area of expertise and his is just one voice in a chorus of complaints about digital depthlessness — be it Keen’s “Cult of the Amateur,” Carr’s “The Shallows” or even in mainstream news commentary such as this New York Times panel discussion on digital books where panelist after panelist, including Carr, claim that the digital is shallow. And then there are all those we encounter in our everyday lives who dismiss tweeting and texting as trivial.

Claiming that certain styles of communicating and knowing are not serious and not worthy of extended attention is nothing new. It’s akin to those claims that graffiti isn’t art and rap isn’t music. The study of knowledge (aka epistemology) is filled with revealing works by people like Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard or Patricia Hill Collins who show how ways of knowing get disqualified or subjugated as less true, deep or important.

And this is where it gets more interesting than Chomsky seems to realize.

Digital communications are produced more by some groups than others. Texting, tweeting and the like are not just the domain of wealthy kids and knowledge workers, as some assume. Research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project has demonstrated that nonwhites are much more likely to connect to the Web, communicate and create content on mobile phones than are whites. Globally, the same trend may be playing out. Research here and elsewhere indicates these so-called shallow ways of communicating are precisely the ways those in the Third World are connecting to and interacting on the Internet.

“In many cases, historically disadvantaged groups have used social media technology to find opportunities previously foreclosed to them. For these folks, social media is hardly trivial,” observes my fellow cyborg, P.J. Rey.

And this is to say nothing of the instrumental role social media has played in the Arab Spring  or the current #occupy protests spreading globally. As I’ve written elsewhere, new ways of communicating facilitated in part by smart phones and social media have given voice and audience to protestors. To some degree (and we can debate how large this is) social media has enabled a mass manufacturing of dissent.

Chomksy, of all people, ought to take note. When he defends his form of communicating (printed books and periodical essays) with claims that tweeting/texting lacks depth, he is implicitly suggesting that nonwhites and those in the Third World are inherently communicating less deeply than their white and first-world counterparts. He doesn’t seem to know enough about the reality of social media to examine his own assumptions.

In fact, in the debate about whether rapid and social media really are inherently less deep than other media, there are compelling arguments for and against. Yes, any individual tweet might be superficial, but a stream of tweets from a political confrontation like Tahrir Square, a war zone like Gaza or a list of carefully-selected thinkers makes for a collection of expression that is anything but shallow. Social media is like radio: It all depends on how you tune it.

But even if we grant Chomsky, Carr and the others that social media is less deep and more instantaneous, the important questions then become: Is instant, digital communication less true? Less worthy? Less valuable? Less linguistically creative? Less politically efficacious?

Chomsky, a politically progressive linguist, should know better than to dismiss new forms of language-production that he does not understand as “shallow.” This argument, whether voiced by him or others, risks reducing those who primarily communicate in this way as an “other,” one who is less fully human and capable. This was Foucault’s point: Any claim to knowledge is always a claim to power. We might ask Chomsky today, when digital communications are disqualified as less deep, who benefits?

President Obama had just given a televised speech on the economy, and this particular gentleman, someone I’d never known well but with whom I’d shared a neighborhood and a classroom for most of kindergarten through 12th grade, a fellow I remember as being pleasant, a bit on the quiet side, a member of the marching band, certainly not a bully or a jerk, had written, “Just turned off the t.v. More lies from B. Hussein Obama.” Within a few minutes, 10 people had “liked” this comment. Within a few more minutes, others had begun to add comments of their own, nearly all of which made reference to the president’s skin color, “questionable” national origin, or socialist death-panel agenda. I nearly fell out of my chair. My heart was racing. I squinted at the screen. I read the comments again and again. This was the real deal, not on Fox News but right here on MY computer, on MY Facebook page. I’d invited it in, that horrible place I’d left the day I graduated from high school. I looked down at my keyboard and saw that my hands were shaking. I decided to add a comment of my own: “Don’t like! Boy, am I glad I don’t live in Richmond anymore. You are un-friended!”

Trying to distract myself, I browsed the status of my other Facebook friends, listened to a little NPR, and yet I kept returning to that moment of profound disorientation, that feeling of having slipped into some alternate political universe. Where am I? I’d felt like asking. Who are these people? Am I truly that out of touch with the place I grew up? Have I actually constructed an enclave of liberal, secular, urban-dwelling, like-minded 30-somethings so sealed off from the rest of the world that a tiny breach in the form of a Facebook post could so thoroughly floor me?

And then I did what I’m a little embarrassed to admit I often do when presented with a problem I can’t solve: I called my dad.

“Have you ever heard a real person refer to our president as ‘Barrack Hussein Obama’?” I asked him.

He laughed. “You mean since lunch?”

My father is a physician in central Virginia, and over the past 35 years he has spent countless hours chatting with his patients, employees, a whole cross-section of regular folks, not shy in their deep social and political conservatism. He told me that he frequently listened to patients rail against the looming menace of socialized medicine right before happily handing over their Medicare card.

“How do you stand it?” I asked him. “How do you not walk around in a constant state of indignation?”

“Oh, I get indignant,” he replied. “I get plenty indignant. But I don’t let it escalate to outrage. If you get outraged, you never learn anything.”

But the truth was, I was walking around in a white-hot rage much of the time. I feel a chronic state of exasperated disbelief at the depth and degree of our country’s current screwed-up-ness: the 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead or the 14 millions Americans out of work, the melting Arctic ice caps or the oil-slicked gulf or the carbon-choked atmosphere, the judicial branch of our government that’s been transformed into a theocratic body, the executive branch’s ongoing infringement of civil liberties and so on and so forth. Like the folks occupying Wall Street, I’m angry. And online, I surround myself by other people who are angry about the same things. At times, our collective anger seems a worthwhile thing — it has a weight and shape and force we couldn’t achieve as individuals, but at other times, I can’t help wondering how much it really accomplishes, if in some ways it might even impede us in our attempts to be more thoughtful, “enlightened” human beings.

As an angsty teenager and college student, I used to mock people who lived in gated communities, who were so afraid of the unfamiliar world they had to erect a physical boundary to keep it at bay. But now I wonder, aren’t the boundaries we draw with Facebook just as secure as a man-made moat or an underpaid security guard manning a booth? Was the daily back-and-forth on my Facebook feed really a conversation, or was it no more than an echo chamber?

A few days ago, a friend of mine sent me an email about the havoc Occupy Wall Street had wreaked on her Facebook feed. She told me how one pro-OWS friend (also a former classmate from a conservative Southern high school) literally began a post with, “For those of you who haven’t blocked me yet.” A few days before that, my friend had grown furious when another former classmate posted the “53 percent” poster, in which a former Marine expressed why he thinks the OWS movement is a bunch of liberal whining. “I was so angry and frustrated seeing these ‘LIKES’ pile up underneath it, these virtual high fives … But the majority of my Facebook feed is like 80 percent pro-Occupy Wall Street. So for me it was a moment of: Wow, I just can’t tolerate any dissent.”

As I asked others about political discourse on Facebook, this was the sort of story I heard again and again. One person got into a hardcore scuffle with a friend’s Republican mother when she posted about the need to protect funding for NPR. Another talked about how enraged she was when, during the general jubilation over Obama’s election, one “friend” posted about the need to pray for the future since the “anti-christ” had been elected. And the common thread in all of these instances was a feeling of shock, a profound bewilderment at one’s private space having been invaded by the political-cultural-socio-religious “other.” We block, we hide, we un-friend, we condemn. And in doing so we can all feel like we’re doing something. It’s wonderful, in a way; we can occupy Wall Street without leaving our living room. Of course, as with anything, there are exceptions …

The same friend of mine who found herself sparring with a 50-year-old housewife over NPR recalls another instance involving a relative whose right-wing perspective she’s actually come to value through Facebook. She tells me, “He’s as passionate about the right wing as I am about the left. And many of his posts are genuinely funny — not just taking potshots at the other side, but laughing at himself, too. His posts give me real insight into what the right is thinking, which I kind of appreciate and have come to value.” My friend emphasized, though, how unusual this sort of insight has become. The far more common experience seems to be that when we hear actual discord, our immediate reaction is not to argue or persuade but to silence, unfriend, block, annihilate — which is of course exactly the sort of stonewalling, obstructionism happening in Washington.

Her story, though, reminded me of someone I knew back in Virginia, an old lady who lived down the street from us. She was twice my parents’ age, a lanky woman with coiffed white hair and a perpetual tan. I remember her as always wearing blue Bermuda shorts and smoking a mentholated Virginia Slim cigarette. She belonged to what she called “an old Chesapeake family,” and there was a Confederate loftiness to her accent and her opinions. She used to invite my whole family down to her house on the James River where we’d catch crabs on the beach and swim until our limbs ached, where she made us lemonade and bought us little presents and took us out on the family boat and mixed pitchers of Old-Fashioneds all the grown-ups raved over. And then one day she came by our house to show off a new puppy she’d just adopted, an inky lab with a silky coat and a pug snout. “We’re calling him Douglas,” she told us. “After the governor [Doug Wilder, the first African American governor of Virginia]. We’re naming him that because he’s soooo black.”

I was only 10 or 11 but I understood what she had said — I understood not just the meaning but the shading, the implications. I loved her. She was a sweet, old lady and a good neighbor and a woman who made racist remarks; she was a family friend and a bigot — she was both these things at once, but we lived down the street from her for 15 years and she’s woven into my earliest memories of childhood and home. We all have memories of such friendships, relationships we might never have chosen, but that challenge and change us in unexpected ways. In Facebook, we have the choice to simply opt out of such challenges, to crop the frame in whatever way suits our political orientation or cultural sensibility. In a world of friending and unfriending, the 99 percent versus the 53 percent, Obama as antichrist against Obama as savior, who, I wonder, has the tolerance anymore for such messy contradictions, such tainted, imperfect kinships? Who has the patience?

The presumption, though Gilad carefully debunks it, is that Twitter is, for some reason, either removing #occupywallstreet from Trends, or has designed an algorithm to prefer banal topics like Kim Kardashian’s wedding over important contentious, political debates. Similar charges emerged around the absence of #wikileaks from Twitter’s Trends when the trove of diplomatic cables was released in December of last year, as well as around the #demo2010 student protests in the U.K., the controversial execution of #TroyDavis in the state of Georgia, the Gaza #flotilla, even the death of #SteveJobs. Why, when these important points of discussion seem to spike, do they not Trend?

Despite an unshakable undercurrent of paranoid skepticism, in the analyses and especially in the comment threads that trail off from them, most of those who have looked at the issue are reassured that Twitter is not in fact censoring these topics. Along with Gilad’s thorough analysis, Angus Johnston has a series of posts debunking the charge of censorship around #wikileaks. Trends has been designed (and redesigned) by Twitter not to simply measure popularity, i.e., the sheer quantity of posts using a certain word or hashtag. Instead, Twitter designed the Trends algorithm to capture topics that are enjoying a surge in popularity, rising distinctly above the normal level of chatter. As Twitter representatives have said, they don’t want simply the most tweeted word (in which case the Trend list might read like a grammar assignment about pronouns and indefinite articles) or the topics that are always popular and seem destined to remain so (apparently this means Justin Bieber).

But the debate about tools like Twitter Trends is, I believe, a debate we will be having more and more often. As more of our online public discourse takes place on a select set of private content platforms and communication networks, and these providers turn to complex algorithms to manage, curate and organize these massive collections, there is an important tension emerging between what we expect these algorithms to be, and what they in fact are. Not only must we recognize that these algorithms are not neutral, and that they encode political choices, and that they frame information in a particular way; we must also understand what it means that we are coming to rely on these algorithms, that we want them to be neutral, we want them to be reliable, we want them to be the effective ways in which we come to know what is most important.

Twitter Trends is only the most visible of these tools. The search engine itself, whether Google or the search bar on your favorite content site (often the same engine, under the hood), is an algorithm that promises to provide a logical set of results in response to a query, but is in fact the result of an algorithm designed to take a range of criteria into account so as to serve up results that satisfy, not just the user, but the aims of the provider, its vision of relevance or newsworthiness or public import, and the particular demands of its business model. As James Grimmelmann observed, “Search engines pride themselves on being automated, except when they aren’t.” When Amazon, or YouTube, or Facebook, offer to algorithmically and in real time report on what is “most popular” or “liked” or “most viewed” or “best selling” or “most commented” or “highest rated,” it is curating a list whose legitimacy is based on the presumption that it has not been curated. And we want them to feel that way, even to the point that we are unwilling to ask about the choices and implications of the algorithms we use every day.

Peel back the algorithms, and this becomes quite apparent. Yes, a casual visit to Twitter’s home page may present Trends as an unproblematic list of terms, which might appear a simple calculation. But a cursory look at Twitter’s explanation of how Trends works — in its policies and help pages, in its company blog, in tweets, in response to press queries, even in the comment threads of the censorship discussions — lays bare the variety of weighted factors Trends takes into account, and cops to the occasional and unfortunate consequences of these algorithms. WikiLeaks may not have trended when people expected it to because it had before; because the discussion of #wikileaks grew too slowly and consistently over time to have spiked enough to draw the algorithm’s attention; because the bulk of messages were retweets; or because the users tweeting about WikiLeaks were already densely interconnected. In response to charges of censorship, Twitter has explained why it believes Trends should privilege terms that spike, terms that exceed single clusters of interconnected users, new content over retweets, new terms over already trending ones. The algorithms that define what is “trending” or what is “hot” or what is “most popular” are not simple measures, they are carefully designed to capture something the site providers want to capture, and to weed out the inevitable “mistakes” a simple calculation would make.

At the same time, Twitter most certainly does curate its Trends lists. It engages in traditional censorship: For example, a Twitter engineer acknowledges here that Trends excludes profanity, something that’s obvious from the relatively circuitous path that prurient attempts to push dirty words onto the Trends list must take. Twitter will remove tweets that constitute specific threats of violence, copyright or trademark violations, impersonation of others, revelations of others’ private information, or spam. (Twitter has even been criticized for not removing some terms from Trends, as in this user’s complaint that #reasonstobeatyourgirlfriend was permitted to appear.) Twitter also engages in softer forms of governance, by designing the algorithm so as to privilege some kinds of content and exclude others, and some users and not others. Twitter offers rules, guidelines and suggestions for proper tweeting, in the hopes of gently moving users toward the kinds of topics that suit its site and away from the kinds of content that, were it to trend, might reflect badly on the site.

Ironically, terms like #wikileaks and #occupywallstreet are exactly the kinds of terms that, from a reasonable perspective, Twitter should want to show up as Trends. If we take the position that Twitter is benefiting from its role in the democratic uprisings of recent years, and that it is pitching itself as a vital tool for important political discussion, and that it wants to highlight terms that will support that vision and draw users to topics that strike them as relevant, #occupywallstreet seems to fit the bill. So despite carefully designing its algorithm away from the perennials of Bieber and the weeds of common language, it still cannot always successfully pluck out the vital public discussion it might want. In this, Twitter is in agreement with its critics; perhaps #wikileaks should have trended after the diplomatic cables were released. These algorithms are not perfect; they are still cudgels, where one might want scalpels. The Trends list can often look, in fact, like a study in insignificance. Not only are the interests of a few often precisely irrelevant to the rest of us, but much of what we talk about on Twitter every day is in fact quite everyday, despite their most heroic claims of political import. But, many Twitter users take it to be not just a measure of visibility but a means of visibility — whether or not the appearance of a term or #hashtag increases audience, which is not in fact clear. Trends offers to propel a topic toward greater attention, and offers proof of the attention already being paid. Or seems to.

Of course, Twitter has in its hands the biggest resource by which to improve its tool, a massive and interested user base. One could imagine “crowdsourcing” this problem, asking users to rate the quality of the Trends lists, and assessing these responses over time and a huge number of data points. But it faces a dilemma: Revealing the workings of its algorithm, even enough to respond to charges of censorship and manipulation, much less to share the task of improving it, risks helping those who would game the system. Everyone from spammers to political activists to 4chan tricksters to narcissists might want to “optimize” their tweets and hashtags so as to show up in the Trends. So the mechanism underneath this tool, which is meant to present a (quasi) democratic assessment of what the public finds important right now, cannot reveals its own “secret sauce.”

Which in some ways leaves us, and Twitter, in an unresolvable quandary. The algorithmic gloss of our aggregate social data practices can always be read/misread as censorship, if the results do not match what someone expects. If #occupywallstreet is not trending, does that mean a) it is being purposefully censored; b) it is very popular but consistently so, not a spike; c) it is actually less popular than one might think? Broad scrapes of huge data, like Twitter Trends, are in some ways meant to show us what we know to be true, and to show us what we are unable to perceive as true because of our limited scope. And we can never really tell which it is showing us, or failing to show us. We remain trapped in an algorithmic regress, and not even Twitter can help, as it can’t risk revealing the criteria it used.

But what is most important here is not the consequences of algorithms, it is our emerging and powerful faith in them. Trends measures “trends,” a phenomenon Twitter gets to define and build into its algorithm. But we are invited to treat Trends as a reasonable measure of popularity and importance, a “trend” in our understanding of the term. And we want it to be so. We want Trends to be an impartial arbiter of what’s relevant, and we want our pet topic, the one it seems certain that “everyone” is (or should be) talking about, to be duly noted by this objective measure specifically designed to do so. We want Twitter to be “right” about what is important, and sometimes we kinda want them to be wrong, deliberately wrong — because that will also fit our worldview: that when the facts are misrepresented, it’s because someone did so deliberately, not because facts are in many ways the product of how they’re manufactured.

We don’t have a sufficient vocabulary for assessing the algorithmic intervention in a tool like Trends. We’re not good at comprehending the complexity required to make a tool like Trends — that seems to effortlessly identify what’s going on, that isn’t swamped by the mundane or the irrelevant. We don’t have a language for the unexpected associations algorithms make, beyond the intention (or even comprehension) of their designers. We don’t have a clear sense of how to talk about the politics of this algorithm. If Trends, as designed, does leave #occupywallstreet off the list, even when its use is surging and even when some people think it should be there, is that the algorithm correctly assessing what is happening? Is it looking for the wrong things? Has it been turned from its proper ends by interested parties? Too often, maybe in nearly every instance in which we use these platforms, we fail to ask these questions. We equate the “hot” list with our understanding of what is popular, the “Trends” list with what matters. Most important, we may be unwilling or unable to recognize our growing dependence on these algorithmic tools, as our means of navigating the huge corpuses of data that we must, because we want so badly for these tools to perform a simple, neutral calculus, without blurry edges, without human intervention, without having to be tweaked to get it “right,” without being shaped by the interests of their providers.