Example: They want to help you be less fanatic about race, gender, etc.... right now the algorythm suggests more and more extreme views to keep you hooked, but it's not doing something beneficial to you apart from providing the links
>The Facebook study, entitled Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks (Kramer et al., 2014), was a collaborative endeavour between Facebook and Cornell University’s Departments of Communication and Information Science. In it, Facebook researchers directly manipulated Facebook users’ news feeds to display differing amounts of positive and negative posts from the people they followed in order to determine whether their subsequent posts were affected by the positivity or negativity of the set of posts they were viewing. This effect, that more positive or negative posts read by a user could change their own emotional state positively or negatively, is the ‘emotional contagion’ referenced in the article.
Other links:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...
A particularly important topic discussed in [2] is "Attention Management". The first step humans use to process sensory input is deciding which (small) part of that data is important. We end up blatantly ignoring[3] most sensory data, because our capacity for attention is surprisingly small and very easily manipulated[4] if you know how to flood someone's input buffers[5].
The more troubling problems start when it isn't a human deciding how to manipulate attention, but instead it's a bunch of machine learning trying to "optimize engagement" (attention).
[1] https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
[2] https://theintercept.com/document/2014/02/24/art-deception-t...
[3] how long does it take you to notice the difference between these two flickering frames: https://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/se367/10/presentation_local...
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZGY0wPAnus
[5] Apollo Robins is shockingly good at using banter to DoS someone's attention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTa7rC1oUnk , https://youtu.be/1kkOKvPrdZ4?t=1882