| Summary: | As social and political life increasingly takes place on social network sites,
new epistemological questions have emerged. How can information disseminated
through new media be understood and disentangled? How can potential hidden agendas
or sources be identified? And what mechanisms govern what and how information is
presented to the user? By drawing on existing research on the algorithms and interfaces
underlying social network sites, this paper provides a discussion of Facebook and the
epistemological challenges, potentials, and questions raised by the platform. The paper
specifically discusses the ways in which interfaces shape how information can be
accessed and processed by different kinds of users as well as the role of algorithms in
pre-selecting what appears as representable information. A key argument of the paper is
that Facebook, as a complex socio-technical network of human and non-human actors,
has profound epistemological implications for how information can be accessed,
understood, and circulated. In this sense, the user’s potential acquisition of information
is shaped and conditioned by the technological structure of the platform. Building on
these arguments, the paper suggests that new epistemological challenges deserve more
scholarly attention, as they hold wide implications for both researchers and users
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