Tired of trolls clogging up your Twitter feed? Or political discussions taking over your Facebook timeline? Gobo is an MIT research project that gives you some control over what you see on your social media feeds by providing a set of filters to prioritise content according to your preferences.
Gobo can pull in your Twitter and Facebook feeds and filter out content based on six criteria: politics; seriousness; rudeness; gender; brands; virality. The idea seems to be not so much about drastically changing what you see online but showing the differences as you play around with the settings, challenging how you think about the content you are served.
The gender filter is interesting. It calculated that only 41 per cent of my Twitter feed is female so I clicked the “mute all men” box to see what a women-only feed would look like for me. Gobo filtered out several neutral accounts such as Cochrane UK (a not-for-profit organisation) and Slate, also excluding individuals I follow for science and technology news, so this gender filter was leading to my missing out on updates I need and want to see.
It’s in the research stage, so I’m not sure how accurate the filters are yet; when I tweaked the sliding bar to exclude more serious Twitter content, a tweet about Podge and Rodge with this text was removed: “Any scuttering gobsheens fancy it?”
