At the age of 26, Greg Marra is one of the most influential people in the world, according to the New York Times.
What does it do? It pilots the algorithm that selects the articles published on Facebook and decides their fate.
It all started when in 2012 Greg Marra uploaded a fake profile on Twitter, @Trackgirl, which was the ideal friend for people who love jogging. This woman interacted with her friends on the Internet, uploaded posts and commented on events related to jogging. She quickly gained followers but all of them were unaware that she was actually a robot.
This experience made Greg Marra famous through an article in Wired magazine, which is very authoritative in the US for technology issues. Immediately, this young boy, who worked at Google, has a passion for robots and states that he likes to create things that come to life on their own, was hired by Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook.
Decides on the articles we read
A month later, this graduate of Olin College, a prestigious engineering school near Boston, where he hails from, became Facebook's head of newsfeed products. His job? Working on the algorithm that decides which articles will be featured high on the newsfeed.
If each of us has access to thousands of posts on Facebook every day, Facebook itself suggests about 300, which are sorted in some order. At the age of 26, Greg Marra has the power to change what the approximately 1.3 billion Facebook members see on their page. This makes him one of the most influential people, according to the New York Times.
He has a tremendous influence especially in America, where 20% of traffic to news sites comes from Facebook, according to research by the company SimpleReach. Currently, 30% of American adults use Facebook to stay informed about current affairs.
This is how Facebook became one of the main news portals.
American media are therefore increasingly dependent on Greg Marra's algorithm, both for traffic and revenue. "15 years ago, Google changed journalism by introducing the referencing technique. Today, it is the parameters of Facebook that are changing journalism again. What we are seeing is that Facebook has allowed us to gain tremendous traffic and reach readers that we could not otherwise reach," says Justin Green, a social media expert for the Washington Examiner newspaper.
Source: iefimerida.gr
