Happy Friday, New York City! We’d like to introduce you to a new, original Brooklyn Eagle series called BK Profiles. This series aims to introduce you to Brooklyn’s content creators, notable characters and luminaries. Some of these individuals are Brooklyn influencers, some serve their community in unique and important ways, whether with socials or without, and some are renown, yet make Brooklyn home.

In our first profile, we introduce you to Gary Francis, a local Gowanian who is passionate about the Gowanus Canal, and routinely tracks the water quality with a portable probe and shares that information via Instagram.

Why exactly does a Brooklynite go through the daily ritual of strolling down to the canal, with specific instruments in tow, to independently track the water quality? Well, Olivia Richter, the writer who profiled Francis, explains how it began three summers ago, after a stretch of heavy rain, when Gowanus residents awoke to thousands of dead fish floating in the canal.

At the time, a spokesperson from the Department of Environmental Protection told a reporter that the canal’s water quality was not to blame for the fish kill, which both enraged and propelled Francis, who states, “When I am told things that are not true to my observations, I can’t let that go.”

The canal has had a profound, personal impact on Francis. Meanwhile, his monitoring, data collection and time paddling with the Gowanus Dredgers has had a unique influence on the community, showing residents “what the canal could become if it were properly cared for and allowed to recover.”

As one of his followers commented, “I love the poo report. You are a NYC treasure.”

Do your social media accounts feed you content that reflects your core beliefs and guiding principles? Our new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that the algorithms supplying your feeds may be prioritizing content that clashes with your values. That’s because the algorithms heavily weigh online posts that you reply to, and social media users tend to more often comment on content they take issue with than content they agree with.

Notably, our study of the X social media platform shows that although the X feed algorithm promotes content to both Democratic and Republican users that contradicts their values, it does so more extensively for Democrats.

Read on to learn more.

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