I'm a scientist that benefits from this money. I'm not a Zuck fan, but I don't like strict policing of speech so I'm alright Zuck's move here. Moderate scientists keep quiet in academia for their own good.
That being said, many of the top-circulating newspapers[1] don't trade on simply reporting the "most-engaging" information. People read the WSJ or NYTimes because they're trustworthy and tend to have a high standard of journalistic integrity, deeply investigate issues and challenge powerful interests. (If you don't believe that's true you probably don't read the WSJ or NYTimes, which makes my point for me...)
Facebook and social media in general does the former, not the latter. And then combines it with algorithms that target content at those most likely to be engaged by it, leading to a cesspool of polarization, echo chambers, and inflammatory arguments.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_Unit...
This is like comparing a match stick to jet fuel.
The comment sections on NYT (apparently the "good" paper) is one of the worst places on the internet. Yet I'm totally okay with it existing because I understand stupid people exist, no matter how much (highly selective) censorship we allow to exist.
Not to mention the serious decline in quality of actual NYT content which seems to select heavily for this commenting audience. I've been reading them for well over a decade and the decline is obvious and full of misinformation daily. There's no winning this fight through letting some random minimum wage moderator FB or Twitter hires, with zero appeals process, or any transparency, and obvious biases, deleting a few articles or comments that offend the type of people who live in the bay area or whatever American city they hire in.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21270659/facebook-divisio...
"“Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” one slide from the presentation read. The group found that if this core element of its recommendation engine were left unchecked, it would continue to serve Facebook users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.” A separate internal report, crafted in 2016, said 64 percent of people who joined an extremist group on Facebook only did so because the company’s algorithm recommended it to them, the WSJ reports."
WSJ further mentions that "some proposed changes would have disproportionately affected conservative users and publishers"
To me this is a sign that the presentation was made by a partisan inside of Facebook. All in all, I don't think this is very confidence inspiring.
We would really need some third party to do a better job of investigating this.
When even internal research suggests that their platform drives division your conclusion is they're overstating their case, people who are on facebooks payroll?
That's like Enron publishing internal research about corruption and someone going "well I guess these guys are partisan"
What you would likely have to do to determine this as an outsider is sample a number of people, ask them for opinions on stuff, look at their feeds. See if certain opinions are overrepresented. Look at correlation between opinions they have and opinions they see while you are at it.