Facebook’s 2016 Election Team Gave Advertisers a Blueprint to a Divided US
buzzfeed.com
buzzfeed.com
Let's walk through how it works:
Step 1) A person posts, or shares, something incredibly divisive. Note: There is no feedback button to let the poster know the content is hateful and that broader society disapproves of it. There is also no consequence to posting it most of the time.
Step 2) The content attracts likes. Since there is no dislike button, or negative feedback, any likes received makes the poster feel good.
Step 3) The poster is emboldened and increases his/her frequency of posting divisive or hateful content. This attracts a following and more engagement for the original poster. The poster has no need to create inclusive content. They are incentivized to find and highlight divisive thoughts from their life because it rewards them with engagement and the Facebook system re-enforces those thoughts.
Step 4) Repeat
Each subsequent post creates more comments, more engagement, more passion. This is great for Facebook because it means more time on site and increased usage frequency. The handout Facebook is giving advertisers is proof of that. They are monetizing the system. Make no mistake, it is designed to work this way and they are profiting from it.
I wonder how people who work for Facebook feel about stuff like this signing their checks. I've long postured it only takes a steady six-figure paycheck to convince an intelligent college-educated individual to put their head in the sand.
Sure there is. Next to Like you have: Love, Laugh, Wow, Sad, Angry.
Here is an example: Share a post about Black Lives causing a riot.
Clear this is fake. Now if a reader of that post puts angry. Are they indicating the post is fake and they are angry with the original poster? Or are they now angry with Black Lives Matter because they think they caused a riot?
Facebook designed it this way so that the original author of the post still gets positive feedback. There is no need to change his/her behavior. They keep posting and the engagement for Facebook keeps rolling.
How is dislike any clearer?
YouTube is public, and has a dislike button... many "fringe" videos still have tons of likes because they are mostly viewed by people sharing the same opinions.
Also, don't forget the share button. That causes the degrees to reset and it goes from there.
Now, for a lot of minority groups, this can be great, maybe positive overall for society. Unless a group with vicious values comes along, then it turns into a problem. Especially if it is found that this minority was in fact never small, just very well amortized across all of our society.
Another aspect though, is that those values could have even been amortized among each individual, in the full set of a person's value. So maybe a person believe many things, and has many values, but they balance out, and generally an overall behavior comes out of them. This behavior maybe is a desired one for society at large. Now comes the internet, or Facebook, and one can explore a subset of its values, maybe the ones that often get most repressed. You explore this in isolation of your other values, almost as a fantasy. Now through this exploration, you find others exploring the same subset. This social finding could somehow re-enforce that value, suddenly weighing it higher into your overall balance. This would mean that it might be a bad thing, as it can alter ones balancing values which have worked for society till now, into a new balance that might exhibit a more detrimental behavior. Alternatively, it could also not affect the behavior when away from the internet. In which case, the internet behavior could mislead us into thinking we have all these people which would have detrimental behavior in real life also, when in reality, we do not, they only exbibit such behaviors when online. And off-course, as we move most of real life on the internet, that might still mean trouble overall.
Just some thoughts.
Taking this into real life, I think this is arguably what is happening with politics today. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being right leaning or left leaning. But as we have begun to segregate ourselves into 'only right leaning' or 'only left leaning' the individuals within these groups have started becoming increasingly radicalized. News that is supportive of the chosen belief is accepted unquestioningly. Negative news of 'the other side' is similarly accepted without question. And, perhaps more than ever before, we are creating a country where people are not only becoming radicalized in their beliefs, but mutually intolerant of anything except those beliefs.
And now a thought experiment. Imagine we broke the country into two by political view. And, for the sake of fairness, we'll pretend that both magically have all the resources/wealth/etc of the original nation. Would this resolve the issues with everybody living happily ever after? I imagine we'd see the exact same cycle begin to be carried out without these new nations as people divided and radicalized once again to no real end. The founding fathers were, in terms of identity and broad political view, relatively homogenous. Yet it took no time for them to break into Federalist vs Antifederalist (in spite of their astute prognostications on the dangers of parties). And as one side or the other gained dominant support it never resulted in stability. Instead there would be a fracturing and new split to no end. But as they remained with arm's reach of each side, radicalism never took that much of a hold. Granted, we did have a sitting vice president kill the first secretary of the treasury in a duel. But in a paradoxical way that illustrates how generally respectful the parties remained. Sufficiently impugning somebody's honor, part and parcel of modern politics, was sufficient cause for a duel which did on occasion result in death.
I think this is a rather rose-tinted view on the amount of corruption and discord that has prevailed in the US, such as the Harding administration.
It also rather depends on your definition of "radicalism". Is white supremacy radical or mainstream? Does that change over time? Does that make it right?
I think there are two main indicators of radicalism. The first is the assumption that one is correct to the point that there is a complete unwillingness to even consider contrary possibilities. The second, which is often linked to the first, is a tendency to resort to violence against those do not feel the same as they do.
So for instance Jehova's Witnesses are certainly not mainstream and their views are quite extreme. But even the most devout and determined door knocker is not somebody I would call a radical. They're happy to, and indeed seem to take immense pleasure, in discussing and defending their religion even to those who would challenge and reject its very core - even if the questioner does so in less than tactful ways. While Jehova's may not necessarily change their view, they would certainly indulge alternative views. And violence is never even considered.
By contrast take those who adhere to radical Islam. In that case anything short of complete deference is seen as a grievous offense. Acts such as drawing their religious figure is seen as sufficient cause to literally murder individuals, in mass. That behavior is absurdly radicalized. In the US we're still far away from that level. But increasingly we're seeing individuals incapable of discussing things with one another, and violence is an increasingly common outcome. And as individuals become further and further ideologically isolated, this radicalism and mutual intolerance is only like to increase.
Seems like it would make group boundaries stronger since people would dislike anything they disagree with.
This study on the community effect of downvotes [1] came to rather different conclusions. They conclude that downvoting has a paradoxical effect. It actually incentivizes the poster to post even more content, of even lower quality. And just as importantly, upvotes similarly have no positive effects. They do not result in users posting more regularly, nor generating more well received content. Upvoted users actually tend to leave the community more quickly than downvoted users. The one and only response that negatively incentivizes users is no response at all - which causes them to leave much earlier than up or down votes. And it gets even better. Downvotes tend to spread. Downvoted users tend to downvoter others who in turn begin downvoting others as well. All of this along with the consequential effects downvoting have on quality.
I'm not sure the content voting system has been a success. The nominal idea is to enable the masses to sort content by quality. But on most sites when the systems are not being gamed, it just results in people upvoting things that stir their emotions (sensationalism, controversy, politics, cat videos). And when it is being gamed, what little meaningfulness that remained is completely removed.
Even on a site like this which is going to have a more well educated and technical userbase than average who clearly make some effort to upvote more on quality than the above metrics, compare the front page to the first page of new. The frontpage should be on the orders of magnitude more interesting and higher quality, since you're comparing a heavily filtered selection to a random selection. Is it?
This isn’t Facebook making this happen.
This is human beings being human beings in an alien environment exposing the difference between their stated preferences and unstated preferences.
It happened with forums, it likely happened with geocities.
You don’t need a like or dislike button, you just need the internet and text.
Anti Semitic forums were attacking Jewish forums before Facebook even showed up.
Facebook is just absorbing the entire internet in that all the “forums” are now just groups on Facebook. So it owns all the ad revenue everywhere - as long as people stay on Facebook.
But there’s no special incentive for divisiveness - that’s just what happens when people interact in a feature deficient, always on, text first, persistent environment.
Also, reddit doesn't spread the content if there is any uptick. It is all pretty confined. Facebook does the exact reverse. It goes out of its way to spread the content that is driving engagement.
This is not true, because if so Reddit’s and their subreddits would have a very different history.
And as another user pointed out, the research shows that a dislike button actually creates MORE engagement and content, not less.
My point is that this is the human mind on the internet; most human beings have no clue about how they work, what their hidden biases are, and what assumptions and fantasies they carry to deal with the world.
When those heuristics are treated to a system that assumes their best behavior, it will fail to our more regular, normal behavior.
As I have mentioned, Facebook's problem is that a) There is endless spread for bad content, like fake news. b) There is no way to have the crowd give definitive negative feedback to the user where not only is a dislike recorded, but the impact of the dislike is weighted based on the standing of the user giving it. c) and even if there was, there is no way to degrade privileges.
The social media companies picked on that and ran with it. So, while Facebook is not exactly the paragon of ethical behavior, this is just fodder for click bait. If the same targeting had worked in someone's favor the article would have been "gave advertisers an edge over traditional advertising" or something.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/16/15657512/...
The difference this time is that Facebook now has a big fraction of the news business. Now this stuff has real traction.
Basically, it all hinges on if the ads mention a candidate (illegal) or were worded in a vague manner (gray zone).
"The corresponding item on the list was highlighted, a bright purple box drawn over it so that the user could see which category he was dealing with at the moment. The hundred categories and names on the list were as follows:
IRRELEVANT MOUTH BREATHER
400-POUND TAB DRINKER
STONE-FACED URBAN HOMEBOY
BURGER-FLIPPING HISTORY MAJOR
SQUIRRELLY WINNEBAGO JOCKEY
BIBLE-SLINGING PORCH MONKEY
ECONOMIC ROADKILL
PENT-UP CORPORATE LICKSPITTLE
HIGH-METABOLISM WORLD DOMINATOR
MIDAMERICAN KNICKKNACK QUEEN