Current Events > Facebook's algorithm intentionally promotes hateful content

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.axios.com/facebook-whistleblower-haugen-profits-over-safety-ceae4674-5352-40ea-a73c-fa5f1ae938cd.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/03/technology/whistle-blower-facebook-frances-haugen.html?smid=tw-share

Frances Haugen, a whistleblower, revealed shocking(is it really though?) insight into Facebook's promotion of "hateful" content: although this content is dangerous to the public at large, it drives engagement(and Facebook's profits), and thus Ms. Haugen claims that Facebook is intentionally lax in enforcing its own community standards on hateful content which receives high engagement. She is set to testify before the Senate on Tuesday.

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So glad I left Facebook behind before it could turn me into hater omega.

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I'm not surprised.

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Remember the early days of Facebook that was rampant with cartel gore videos

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The only people who still use Facebook are literally the worst examples of every demographic lmao

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Bump.

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FB: Where youll get kicked out of a fan group for The Office for saying Dwight, you ignorant slut, but a post where a right-wing nut job called a family member r******* out of nowhere was never deleted despite my reporting it.

No surprises here.

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Well no shit, it gets clicks

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I don't seem to have that problem on FB, thankfully.

Fucking duh. Negativity and critique gets top page priority on social media but say you post colorful art, a song, something nice, etc. that shit is lucky to get 2 minutes of attention and a handful of likes before being dusted into oblivion.

Hate is more appealing on facebook.

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Jagr_68 posted...

Hate is more appealing on facebook.

Let's call it Hatebook, then.

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Fuck the Zuck. This shit can not be ignored.

Who believes in facebook? Anyone trust Mark Zuckerberg?

nfearurspecimn posted...

is that Pikachu?

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I mean, it's more like it prioritized driving activity over ensuring a safe community. Topic title is bombastic.

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dcn2424 posted...

Who believes in facebook? Anyone trust Mark Zuckerberg?

I don't trust androids.

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Remember when Facebook first started and it was all college and high school kids, and it was the place to be for everyone and you weren't cool unless you had a profile and had a lot of friends and posted a lot of pictures of yourself at parties and shit, and now it's an absolute cesspool of old people bitching and arguing about politics and conspiracy theories? What a really strange, funny turn.

ShineboxPhil posted...

Remember the early days of Facebook that was rampant with cartel gore videos

i had a Pinoy friend (not real friend, just guild member of an online game) posting gore on his wall. told him to take it off and he mass report my account and it got banned.
that time realized that Facebook is just one big waste of time.

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This is a perfect example of when factual evidence should be used to limit influence.

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This... did not start with social media.

COVxy posted...

I mean, it's more like it prioritized driving activity over ensuring a safe community. Topic title is bombastic.

But they did so knowing well what that entailed
https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/3/22707860/facebook-whistleblower-leaked-documents-files-regulation

While the company repeatedly claims it is helping stop hate speech, at least on its own products, one internal Facebook document leaked by Haugen says, We estimate that we may action as little as 3-5% of hate and ~0.6% of V&I [Violence and Incitement] on Facebook despite being the best in the world at it.
Another document was even more blunt. We have evidence from a variety of sources that hate speech, divisive political speech, and misinformation on Facebook and the family of apps are affecting societies around the world.
Haugen claims the root of the problem is the algorithims rolled out in 2018 that govern what you see on the platform. According to her they are meant to drive engagement and the company has found that the best engagement is the kind instilling fear and hate in users. Its easier to inspire people to anger than it is to other emotions, Hagen said.

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according to the Wall Street Journals reporting on Haugens concerns, the result was a sharp turn towards anger and hate. Misinformation, toxicity, and violent content are inordinately prevalent among reshares, said one internal memo quoted by the Journal, assessing the effects of the change.
The Wall Street Journal began publishing its findings from the cache under the name The Facebook Files in September. One report alleging Facebook had research proving Instagram harmed teenage girls has since led to a Congressional hearing. Ahead of the hearing Facebook attempted to change the narrative in a blog post, which reproduced two of the reports referred to in the Journals reporting.

Prioritizing driving activity with the knowledge that hateful content drives the most activity does not seem meaningfully distinct from the topic title.

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I was talking about this in another topic about antivaxx misinformation last week. It's not the first or the only type. News media itself is propelled by this, but it's more dangerous when it's just algorithms.

The absolute biggest problem we have in the country is misinformation at the algorithmic level. Basically, it doesn't care if it takes you to something that's complete bullshit. We need to change that because in general, most people can't discern truth from fiction. Even tons of otherwise smart people.

Also this is what I was referring to in terms of the the damage that misinformation is having on the susceptible and the rise of the right and conspiracies.

Lots of good info on what the NYT found with the radicalization of Brazil and how YouTube was responsible. There's an episode version of the article that goes into even more detail.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/11/world/americas/youtube-brazil.html

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Boombam99 posted...

Remember when Facebook first started and it was all college and high school kids, and it was the place to be for everyone and you weren't cool unless you had a profile and had a lot of friends and posted a lot of pictures of yourself at parties and shit, and now it's an absolute cesspool of old people bitching and arguing about politics and conspiracy theories? What a really strange, funny turn.

The Social Network is still a great watch

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CRON posted...

The only people who still use Facebook are literally the worst examples of every demographic lmao

True. I switched to matrix.

Thompson posted...

Let's call it Hatebook, then.

dcn2424 posted...

Who believes in facebook? Anyone trust Mark Zuckerberg?

I avoid anything related to facebook. Same for google.


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Antifar posted...

Prioritizing driving activity with the knowledge that hateful content drives the most activity does not seem meaningfully distinct from the topic title.

Intent usually matters. Intent here is not to spread hate, but to drive activity. Topic title suggests otherwise. Would be more fucked up if people running facebook wanted to spread anti-vaxx/racist/fascist materials for the purpose of spreading the word, no?

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I'm pretty much just on to shout at the masses of conspiracy theorists that they're dumb pieces of shit. If the hateful stuff is constantly on my page then it's much easier to find

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COVxy posted...

Intent usually matters. Intent here is not to spread hate, but to drive activity. Topic title suggests otherwise. Would be more fucked up if people running facebook wanted to spread anti-vaxx/racist/fascist materials for the purpose of spreading the word, no?

We can't confidently say that isn't the case. We can say that a former chief of staff of the Bush admin was a key decision maker on issues like this: https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21270659/facebook-division-news-feed-algorithms

Leading the effort to downplay these concerns and shift Facebooks focus away from polarization has been Joel Kaplan, Facebooks vice president of global public policy and former chief of staff under President George W. Bush. Kaplan is a controversial figure in part due to his staunch right-wing politics he supported Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh throughout his nomination and his apparent ability to sway CEO Mark Zuckerberg on important policy matters. Kaplan has taken on a larger role within Facebook since the 2016 election, and critics say his approach to policy and moderation is designed to appease conservatives and stave off accusations of bias.
Kaplan, for instance, is believed to be partly responsible for Facebooks controversial political ad policy, in which the company said it would not regulate misinformation put forth in campaign ads by fact-checking them. Hes also influenced Facebooks more hands-off approach to speech and moderation over the last few years by arguing the company doesnt want to seem biased against conservatives.
The Wall Street Journal says Kaplan was instrumental in weakening or entirely killing proposals to change the platform to promote social good and reduce the influence of so-called super-sharers, who tended to be aggressively partisan and, in some cases, so hyper-engaged that they might be paid to use Facebook or might be a bot. Yet, Kaplan pushed back against some of the proposed changes many of which were crafted by News Feed integrity lead Carlos Gomez Uribe for fear they would disproportionately affect right-wing pages, politicians, and other parts of the user base that drove up engagement.
One notable project Kaplan undermined was called Common Ground, which sought to promote politically neutral content on the platform that might bring people together around shared interests like hobbies. But the team building it said it might require Facebook take a moral stance in some cases by choosing not to promote certain types of polarizing content and that the effort could harm overall engagement over time, the WSJ reports. The team has since been disbanded.

https://www.motherjones.com/media/2020/10/facebook-mother-jones/

But, says the former Facebook employee, there was a hitch: Everyone knew that most of the untrustworthy junk on Facebook, when it came to politics, originated with conservative/conspiratorial sites. And while Facebook was under fire from both right and left, its chief worrynow that Republicans had regulatory power in Washingtonwas getting Trump off their back.
Conservatives had been very effective at working the refs by accusing the platforms of liberal bias, especially after a widely publicized 2016 incident in which platform moderators were accused of suppressing pro-Trump content. After that, says a former employee who worked on News Feed, it was made clear that we cant do a ranking change that would hurt Breitbarteven if that change would make the News Feed better. (Breitbart News, where Steve Bannon was still executive chair, seems to have been a particular obsession.)
So, too, with the January 2018 changes: Republican lobbyists in the DC office said, Hold on, how will it affect Breitbart? recalls another ex-employee. Testing showed that the proposed changes would take a huge chunk out of Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, the Daily Wire, and the Daily Caller. There was enormous pushback. They freaked out and said, We cant do this.
The code was tweaked, and executives were given a new presentation showing less impact on these conservative sites and more harm to progressive-leaning publishersincluding Mother Jones. The problem was that the progressive outlets were real [news] outlets like yours, recalls the ex-employee, and the right ones were garbage outlets. You guys were one of the outlets who got singled out to balance the ledger.
It was not the first time that Kaplan had stepped up to protect conservative disinformation. The Washington Post has reported that in December 2016, senior leaders were briefed on an internal investigation known as Project P (for propaganda) showing that right-wing accounts, most of them based overseas and most with financial motives, were behind a lot of the viral disinformation on the platform. But Kaplan objected to disabling these accounts because it will disproportionately affect conservatives.

More recently, the newsletter Popular Info reported last year that whenever conservative sites were accused of violating Facebooks policiesas when Shapiros Daily Wire allegedly created a network of pages to increase trafficKaplan stepped up to protect them. (The Daily Wires co-CEO Jeremy Boreing told us, We endeavor to abide by the ever-changing rules of the platforms on which we operate, but were also an aggressive organization.) It was also reportedly Kaplan who in 2018 pushed for the Daily Caller, which has been regularly excoriated for publishing misinformation, including fake nudes of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to be brought in as one of Facebooks fact-checking partners.

We also know that their "public policy director for global elections" used to work for Giuliani and the RNC.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/03/facebook-politics-republicans-right

Katie Harbath, the companys public policy director for global elections, led digital strategy for Rudy Giulianis 2008 presidential campaign and the Republican National Committee. She has been the principal defender of the companys decision to allow political adverts, even those including blatantly misleading claims, a move that earned a sharp rebuke from the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin among others and put it at odds with Twitter, which announced this week that it will refuse such ads.

Maybe they aren't themselves anti-vax fascists, but if the intent by conservative FB execs was merely to preserve that stuff so that Breitbart, Daily Wire, and GOP candidates for Congress could continue to "spread the word" as you put it, is that better?

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Boombam99 posted...

Remember when Facebook first started and it was all college and high school kids, and it was the place to be for everyone and you weren't cool unless you had a profile and had a lot of friends and posted a lot of pictures of yourself at parties and shit, and now it's an absolute cesspool of old people bitching and arguing about politics and conspiracy theories? What a really strange, funny turn.

Social networks are the rough equivalent of skipping class and smoking out behind the dumpsters.
It stops being cool when your mom shows up.

CRON posted...

The only people who still use Facebook are literally the worst examples of every demographic lmao

yes because Twitter and Instagram are just full of beacons of society

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ElatedVenusaur posted...

https://www.axios.com/facebook-whistleblower-haugen-profits-over-safety-ceae4674-5352-40ea-a73c-fa5f1ae938cd.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/03/technology/whistle-blower-facebook-frances-haugen.html?smid=tw-share

Frances Haugen, a whistleblower, revealed shocking(is it really though?) insight into Facebook's promotion of "hateful" content: although this content is dangerous to the public at large, it drives engagement(and Facebook's profits), and thus Ms. Haugen claims that Facebook is intentionally lax in enforcing its own community standards on hateful content which receives high engagement. She is set to testify before the Senate on Tuesday.

And now it doesn't promote anything.

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Twitter isnt much better to be honest

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lolife67 posted...

I don't seem to have that problem on FB, thankfully.

Same. I think me only paying attention to stuff I like is a huge reason why, and me not going out of my way to find stuff I dont like is another huge reason.

And I dont understand how everyone on here says its only old people that use Facebook. Is this place filled with 50 year olds then?

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I've spent probably less than 15 minutes total on facebook in the last 2 years
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ColdOne666 posted...

Twitter isnt much better to be honest

Twitter is good if you follow a limited amount of people and don't read responses to any of their tweets.

I basically use it to follow any breaking sports stories, and for injury updates for fantasy sports purposes.

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