The irony is that the media is doing this now, with respect to anything related to Facebook. Facebook is a website with 99.9% benign user generated content. The news media has been spreading outrage and paranoia and trying to get 'engagement' since before Facebook was born.
If only 0.01% of toxic content by terms of volume is receiving disproportionate attention and focus, not only permissible but actively encouraged by complex opaque algorithms, then it is certainly a much bigger problem then it's meagre character count would otherwise suggest.
To me, this needs to be split into two use cases. The fact that .01% of content gets viewed a lot more than average is not a bad thing. Much of user content is junk with a heavy dose of ads for a seasoning. It is perfectly reasonable that original or thoughtful posts, even if unpleasant or provocative, get much higher traffic. The problem is the algorithmic reinforcement that encourages those making short-term sensationalist statements.
Let's still allow folks to voice their opinions, whichever they are, and advertise them by the digital age equivalents to "word of mouth". Just keep it human, not algorithm driven. My 2c.
Without those spontaneous user-composed opinions and anecdotes, the platform would quickly become (or perhaps already has become) plastic and artificial. As anyone having to relate information through a bureaucratic communications department has certainly experienced, even the most unique, interesting and useful story in the world stands little chance against an eager team of copy editors and PR representatives.
My presumption is that by far the single biggest signal on whether to display a post on the FB feed to more people is how many people like and share. That's a people problem at the core, not an algorithm problem.
It's still an algorithm problem at its core, because the algorithm is what determines what the "single biggest signal" it will use for amplification is. There's no reason why maximum shareability should be the main factor, it could be something else like some proxy for erudition, for instance.
Simply: it’s all content and it’s impact depends on the people who take the information in and then apply their beliefs and understanding to it.
Some content is simple - recipes for example.
Others are impossible to parse: “they want to reduce hate speech” translates as “they want to remove conservative/right wing speech” (this actually happened in a conversation yesterday. Suggesting that the term hate speech is being transformed/co opted)
Engagement in contrast, is simple, reliable and measurable.
I don't think that's true, it's just that the proxies are imperfect. But the specific alternative metric wasn't that important to my point.
> Engagement in contrast, is simple, reliable and measurable.
That's the root of the problem: the algorithms have been designed to use "simple, reliable, and [easily] measurable" things as their whole input, and then narrowly A/B tested to maximize some other easily measurable output. Looked at holistically, it's too simple to do an acceptable job.
If you took a similar attitude, and applied it to create an algorithm for another discipline, like medicine for instance, it'd be pretty clear it'd be a disaster.
However, this shows that the root problem really is human. You can tell because you are suggesting designing an algorithm to fix a pre-existing problem. Without algorithms of any sort, this problem is there.
I don’t think it can be solved by algorithm.
I think we can all agree that quantity isn't the right metric for this - whether that's number of posts or amount of traffic on a given post. What we're really trying to do is gauge what the conversation is.
Having said that, there are clear distinguishable problems we can point to that have an interesting quantifier. Anonymous 'Campaign' groups run by individuals that have previously been associated with Brexit campaigning are currently spending millions on Brexit advertising. There is no indication of where the money comes from to pay for these (we know it's not from the people who are associated with the page because they're just staffers).
In that way I agree with you - the thing to worry about is where the ad dollars are spent, but I don't think that's the only thing we should be worrying about.
The 1% Rule says that in any online community, 1% of participants create content while 99% lurk [1].
I'll propose Panarky's Corollary that 90% of the crap is produced by 0.1% of the participants and then shared, liked and amplified by 90% of participants.
These 0.1% pathological participants are corporations advertising, governments propagandizing, zealots proselytizing, and trolls antagonizing.
Facebook can see these patterns better than anyone, and they could eliminate or de-rank the material from the 0.1% if they wanted to.
But the 0.1% is disproportionately incendiary and therefore profitable, so Facebook has a very strong incentive to look the other way.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
That's not my starting assumption.
I think Facebook has a problem that its typical so-called "benign" users are creating less and less content, while malignant content-makers are not discouraged.
The whole point of tolerance is to say "I don't agree with that, but I respect your right to do your own thing."
This is advocating the exact opposite. Under this philosophy I can not longer be tolerant, because anything I "permit" I will be accused of promoting.
This seems like a recipe for a horrible, horrible world.
Not really. Facebook put it there for me. Time and again it shows me items like "[Friend] replied to a comment on [toxic thing]", where the thing gets a prominent preview etc. I haven't seen a real update from [Friend] in my feed for months, yet there are plenty when I visit their profile. Even if the friend is fighting the good fight and has commented to correct some misconceptions, it's clear that this particular action was selected for my feed because it's related to a controversial item.
If it weren't for comments from non-friends, Facebook would have no toxic content for me at all.
Facebook was great until it started inserting posts from people I didn't explicit whitelist as friends, and I'm including news articles in that category.
You mean like the rumour-mongering, low-effort politics etc. in your standard tabloid?
https://www.thisisinsider.com/social-media-link-depression-l...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rise-in-suicide-and-social-medi...
There's certainly a lot of irony in this article lambasting Facebook for spreading outrage culture, itself written in such a vitriolic tone
This is an excellent point, and I'm a little embarrassed that I didn't catch it myself.
Publishing used to be hugely profitable because you needed a printing press or a big radio tower, which cost a million dollars, which made it rare and therefore valuable. If you wanted to advertise there weren't that many publishers to choose from in a given market, so they got to charge high rates.
Then the internet smashed the economics of that to smithereens. The New York Times now has to compete with your blog. And your blog doesn't have that much traffic, but the sum total of all blogs and social media actually does, so the number of ad dollars going to traditional publishers has gone way down.
People always point to Google because they sell advertising and get their cut when they do. But the thing Google replaced isn't publishers, it's ad sales reps, and nobody weeps for them. The "loss" isn't the commission going to Google instead of some ad rep, it's the tiny amounts each going to millions of bloggers which used to get summed up and pay the salaries of thousands of reporters.
Which is why the publishers are willing to resort to underhanded dirty tricks as they did to get the EU copyright directive -- because their goal is to shut down all of this user generated content which competes with them for lucrative eyeballs.
You could have stopped at the comma. How many people out there regularly watch Fox News and MSNBC? Or read The Rolling Stone and the WSJ? We've had partisan bubbles for as long as we've had any sort of mass media.
As background, I've spent years writing on social media (and used to work in it):
My Media literacy guide:
http://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README.m...
A piece I did for Quartz on Selective Facts:
https://qz.com/1130094/todays-biggest-threat-to-democracy-is...
And my data analysis of the NY Times (with an example in social media):
I definitely think it's true that mass media has become more partisan. But, as you note, it's not coming from social media. It's coming from the cost of delivering content being driven to practically zero while simultaneously being able to reach nearly everyone in the world.
This I disagree with. It's bad, but nowhere near as bad as it was 50 or 100 years ago.
It used to be that most cities had individual newspapers aligned with each party, and sometimes with factions within that party. Those newspapers had to moderate themselves when economic pressures forced mergers, which is why so many newspapers have hyphenated names.
For example, at one time the Los Angeles Times was so staunchly pro-Republican that it didn't even report the results of Democratic primaries or candidates.
Today we're quite homogenous by comparison. People on both sides of the aisle believe more-or-less the same things, but we zoom in on the tiny differences and exaggerate them. The media does its best to facilitate this, because its business model depends on eyeballs, and eyeballs are driven by novelty and controversy.
Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit do.
That's the fundamental difference. You can get a biased, partisan opinion from whichever tabloid you read... But that tabloid doesn't make it trivial to discover that there's two dozen like-minded lunatics, that you can get together with, to get validation for your crazy ideas.
Reading, or having a subscription to the Wall Street Journal doesn't give me membership in the political club it's targeted at, or a hotline to a dozen industrialists. Reading something shared by the Flat Earth Society of Truth on Facebook does, because the link to their Facebook group is right there, and they are looking for members.
Also the choices sites make based on your profile sometimes offend or puzzle people as they can seem personal or even offensive. For instance if someone gets ads or suggested content for acne control or weight loss, it could be seen as hurtful or offensive.
What i think sucks the most is that if you silence this nonsense the result isn't that they quietly retreat away but they weaponize the silencing as censorship and it they use that to boost their signal and people see/hear the controversy and instead of letting it fade away like it should that controversy is boosted on social media and it gives them some appearance of validity.
same playbook fascists use
In other contexts, it's understood that security by obscurity is bad.
> Fox News exacerbates poisonous politics by creating filter bubbles of like-minded partisans, spreading hoaxes and inaccuracies, inducing anxiety and paranoia, rewarding clickbait and outrage, and so on
([1])
> CNN exacerbates poisonous politics by creating filter bubbles of like-minded partisans, spreading inaccuracies, inducing anxiety and paranoia, rewarding clickbait and outrage, and so on
(removed hoaxes since I couldn't find much in that line, but feel welcome to correct me [2])
> Big media companies with political interests exacerbate poisonous politics by creating filter bubbles of like-minded partisans, spreading hoaxes and inaccuracies, inducing anxiety and paranoia, rewarding clickbait and outrage, and so on
([1], [2])
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_controversies
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNN_controversies#Persian_Gulf...
I also don't know of any other media property that has Facebook's "circulation"; Facebook has around 2.3 billion "subscribers".
Nor is FB, in the context of this discussion. Those 2.3 billion people are not 'subscribers', they are content creators and distributors.
It's not like Zuck and his staff personally come up with nefarious stories to put on FB and indoctrinate the masses.
At what point do we accept that polarization (in a tribal sense) is a featurebug in human psychology? Maybe fb is just giving us what we want.
One way to read the new's industry's issues with Facebook is that, actually, yes they did, and they're trying to protect the turf that Facebook is encroaching on.
The media has an incredible power to set the agenda, in both a positive (choosing to cover) and negative (eliminating a story by simply ignoring it to death) sense, and it uses it to an extent that can only be called "routine".
> The company is the largest television station operator in the United States by number of stations, and largest by total coverage; owning or operating a total of 193 stations across the country in over 100 markets (covering 40% of American households)...
> Sinclair's stations have been known for featuring news content and programming that promote conservative political positions, and have been involved in various controversies surrounding politically-motivated programming decisions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group#Polit...
I think we, as users, bear a lot of responsibility for the content we create and if there's a lot of awful stuff out there... well, we created it. But I think someone deciding to make a bunch of money in concentrating and distributing that awfulness deserves a lot of scrutiny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWLjYJ4BzvI
I don't think there's evidence of that right now with Facebook.
Eh, it's closer to that then you might think if you haven't seen the chart of who owns what, and how few "owners" there actually are. It's not technically a monopoly, but a reasonable case can be made it's an oligarchy.
But no, it's not literally a single entity.
(I don't necessarily endorse this chart fully, you can search yourself on "who owns media companies", but the info is sometimes out of date as they buy and sell things. But it at least generally looks like https://www.webfx.com/data/the-6-companies-that-own-almost-a... )
In fact, it hasn't been for a while.
Authentic user identification ceased to matter, when two things happened. 1. facebook opened its doors to non-collegiate email address account creation (a throttle that actually regulated real names and authentic identity). 2. major news outlets started pushing facebook as part of "The Blogosphere" which offered a fundamental signal to TV land, that viewers could find the next AOL on facebook.
After that, user head count became smoke and mirrors, and a lie. Sure, you can gain an understanding of how many people know who Mario and Luigi are, by how many Nintendo consoles are sold, but that's not what matters, when your making movies, holding conventions, and you've got business agreements cemented with global news outlets, for perpetual free publicity, for as long as news gets pushed through channels like CNN and Fox News. There's enough brainwashing power in that, such that people feel safe to dump casual banter and get sloppy with conversations inside facebook, revealing locations and insight to give a glimpse of a cut of social activity for the safe-for-work crowd.
And that's what Facebook is up to by now. It's just forum software, to replace old school bulletin boards, and offer impromptu mix of craigslist style performance art and classifieds, that maybe grandma might see.
It's not just the fraction of "bad" content in your system, it's also the level of propagation. Most of the "99.9% benign" content will not draw a lot of eyes per piece of content, while I'd guess "bad" content will draw a lot more eyes, and ergo have a bigger impact.
I made the opposite argument in the past, actually. I am a proponent of reclassifying facebook etc as common carriers/utilities and forcing them not to censor any content unless it's actually illegal content. Tho, that does not and can not mean they have an obligation to promote such content e.g. through search results.
However, words do have impact, and may be used as a weapon to incite the readers to certain actions. This can be actions I like, or actions that I find abhorrent.
Then again, the danger that censorship poses to a free society, and the danger of unfettered censorship by private parties controlling major chunks of the "public marketplace of ideas" in particular, outweighs the dangers of bad people publishing legal but reprehensible speech, by a lot. The censorship we allow has to be minimal, and driven by societal consensus or compromise, and right now the state, with a separation of power and checks and balances, while not perfect, is still the far better alternative than letting a Zuckerberg or a Brin or a Dorsey or a Huffman unilaterally decide what's OK and what gets banned.
News channels make the extremely rare seem common, and the common seem like it doesn't exist. All to drive ad revenue. Now traditional news is rapidly becoming irrelevant and we see pay walls popping up left and right. I would argue that the news media is worse at propagating extreme fear and paranoia, than Facebook. At least a lot of Facebook content is funny/viral videos, whereas the news is 90+% negative
There's a large amount of "media" folks who at worst title an article in a way that catch's eyeballs, compared to those actually pushing straight bullshit.
Anyone selling BS to people deserves scorn, that includes Facebook.
Consider that algorithmic trading in stock markets is insanely noisy, and each trade comes with a fee. Many trades are executed as pricing probes, or efforts to exploit a minute shift in a given price. Assume facebook traffic has similar motives, just to suck impressions into a viral current for any particular campaign of appeal, or at least convince clientelle that advertising with a PR firm actually works. Gaining available eyeballs results in fractions of a penny in certain "users" pockets.
That's speculation, though. There's not enough information publicly available to know for sure.
99.5% of Boing 737 MAX never crashed. That doesn't mean that 0.5% crashing isn't a systematic problem that is newsworthy and demands action.
That is exactly right. I have no idea what "platform" means, but I know what "website" means. (Or "endpoint".)
Facebook was not always in the "news" business. The original website in fact had no "news" feed and initially users complained when they added this "feature".
The addition of "news" of the kind produced by journalists was added as part of this "feature" much, much later.
Facebook and the news media both sell ad space, but no one stores their personal photos and correspondence with the news media. If Facebook is, as Zuckerberg would claim, not a news organization, then Facebook cannot claim to have made any positive improvement on the quality of journalism. It stands to reason aside from "convenience" there is no benefit to getting news via Facebook's website versus the website of the news organization that produces it. To the extent Facebook manipulates the news that people recieve via the Facebook website, there could be negative effects.
AFAIK, the news media do not create online versions of their newspapers that (outside the control of the reader) automatically change what stories are presented based on the reader's identity. Though with the influence of Facebook's methods, it would not surprise me to hear that this was happening.
Whatever the case, certainly there must be a journalistic ethical principle that would point away from algorithmically manipulating which news reports are delivered to each reader, even if newspapers know the identity of each reader and what each reader has read in the past. "News", as in "newspapers", is the antithesis of controlled communications where not everyone recieves the same information, e.g., within a corporation.
Perhaps an analogy would be a library that knows the identity of its patrons and the items they have checked out in the past. It might be able to make predictions and manipulate which items each patron was exposed to when they visited the library, but it would seem against the fundamental purpose of a library to do such a thing.
The question to ask is what place does "news" (as in "newspaper" not updates on others' Facebook pages) have amongst people's personal photos and correspondence, the "99.9% benign user generated content"?
Why is it there?
Here is some background reading.
https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/504/Brain-Ha...
https://www.wired.com/story/inside-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-...
"January 2018
Facebook begins announcing major changes, aimed to ensure that time on the platform will be "time well spent."
In fact, it was in besting just such a rival that Facebook came to dominate how we discover and consume news. Back in 2012, the most exciting social network for distributing news online wasn't Facebook, it was Twitter. The latter's 140-character posts accelerated the speed at which news could spread, allowing its influence in the news industry to grow much faster than Facebook's. "Twitter was this massive, massive threat," says a former Facebook executive heavily involved in the decisionmaking at the time.
So Zuckerberg pursued a strategy he has often deployed against competitors he cannot buy: He copied, then crushed. He adjusted Facebook's News Feed to fully incorporate news (despite its name, the feed was originally tilted toward personal news) and adjusted the product so that it showed author bylines and headlines."