The Movement of Algorithms: How Social Media Feeds Shape Public Perception During Protests

Examining the role of algorithms during the Jantar Mantar NEET protest coverage, this report highlights how social media platforms prioritize engagement and emotional resonance over balanced facts, curating entirely different realities for different users based on their digital behavior.

Key Highlights:
- Personalized Realities: Algorithms analyze watch time, likes, comments, and shares to serve content that reinforces pre-existing opinions, creating filter bubbles and echo chambers.
- Engagement over Truth: Content that provokes strong emotions, shock, or anger spreads much faster than balanced, factual reporting, fueling societal polarization.
- Misinformation & Fact-Checking: Both sides of protests often encounter manipulated or out-of-context videos, while fact-checkers struggle to catch up with viral narratives.
- The Illusion of Consensus: Customized comment sections and tailored video feeds make users mistakenly believe that 'everyone thinks like me'.
- Digital Literacy: Understanding that social media feeds are reflections of our digital behavior rather than objective mirrors of the world is crucial for modern civic discourse.