Facebook Knew Their Platform Was Divisive and Chose Not To Address It
Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:
In essence, Facebook is under fire for making the world more divided. Many of its own experts appeared to agree—and to believe Facebook could mitigate many of the problems. The company chose not to.
Old news.
Another concern, they and others said, was that some proposed changes would have disproportionately affected conservative users and publishers, at a time when the company faced accusations from the right of political bias.
A 2016 presentation that names as author a Facebook researcher and sociologist, Monica Lee, found extremist content thriving in more than one-third of large German political groups on the platform. Swamped with racist, conspiracy-minded and pro-Russian content, the groups were disproportionately influenced by a subset of hyperactive users, the presentation notes. Most of them were private or secret.
Facebook is the social network for racists.
The high number of extremist groups was concerning, the presentation says. Worse was Facebook’s realization that its algorithms were responsible for their growth. The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”
To their credit, some Facebook employees were concerned about this, and tried to implement new features and policies to correct course.
Building these features and combating polarization might come at a cost of lower engagement, the Common Ground team warned in a mid-2018 document, describing some of its own proposals as “antigrowth” and requiring Facebook to “take a moral stance.”
Zuck said “nah, imma pass”.
One early discovery: Bad behavior came disproportionately from a small pool of hyperpartisan users.
A second finding in the U.S. saw a larger infrastructure of accounts and publishers on the far right than on the far left. Outside observers were documenting the same phenomenon. The gap meant even seemingly apolitical actions such as reducing the spread of clickbait headlines—along the lines of “You Won’t Believe What Happened Next”—affected conservative speech more than liberal content in aggregate.
The fact that conservatives are more likely to publish clickbait headlines with misinformation to ensnare ignorant readers who may not be as invested in less sensationalized news says a lot about the state of conservatism in America today. The fact that they can’t play by the rules and still win every now and then doesn’t mean Facebook should write a new, less fair rule book for them.
Don’t get it twisted: Facebook executives made a conscious decision to prioritize profit over ethics. They decided that their bottom line was more important than making sure that their platform wasn’t making human beings more hostile and inflamed.