This isn't a Facebook problem as such. It's just sensationalistic journalism. Just that Facebook as a platform helps amplfiy it. Just my 2 cents.
Depending on what's being dumped in the river the polluter can be thrown in jail, the govt can be sued, the river can be closed off etc etc
But what helps in determining damage is the curve. On all kinds of chemicals.
Right now when Facebook allows ppl to swim in info sewage no one knows what the dose - response is.
There is no EPA.
And in the big scheme of things, algorithms aren’t even all that good yet. They are only going to get better at manipulating us and making us want and need it. Like the study with the mice that would compulsively push a lever to deliver drugs until they starved to death. Using digital stimulus to illicit the addictive biochemical reaction in our brain instead of a drug’s more direct chemical delivery method. Or maybe I’m just paranoid.
I'm borderline anal about managing which notifications I allow if a particular service lets you adjust them at all, but I feel like I'm constantly turning off some new one that they must have added and opted me into by default. I know I can turn them off for an app entirely, but sometimes I legitimately want a "ding" if a friend sends me a message. Yet I still feel like I'm in a constant haze of pointless "notifications" that are not about some event I need or even want to know about it. It's just attention theft, where a hostile computer program acts of it's own accord to cause my brain to have thoughts I didn't intend to have and waste my precious attention. I didn't ask for it to remind me of something, or let me know when a specific thing happens. This isn't even a "notification." It's just spam funneled into a channel that spammers know we haven't completely tuned out yet. They'll strip mine it until nobody bothers to pay attention to notifications anymore, and then they'll move to the next channel that still has any attention left in it.
If I could request any feature from Apple right now, it would be to treat "attention grabbing" as strictly as it has access to the device's camera or photos. Instead of a blanket "allow notifications," make developers register exactly which notifications they want to send with a predefined message template. Let me easily switch each of those templates on or off in the general settings app instead of having to hunt through the settings pages of the app itself (if it offers the option to tweak notifications at all).
From there on, it's just a matter of highlighting these successful matches constantly in your feeds.
I wouldn't put it past that.
I see 2 potential problems.
If the approach would be content-neutral - i.e. simply relying on the form of the information (eg misspellings in the title, many exclamation points, and such) to distinguish that which is more likely to be fake - then there could be a race condition where the misinformation purveyors learn and subvert the algorithm followed by the misinformation identifier incorporating the new forms of misinformation, and so on. In the meantime, true information purveyors would also need to be aware of this algorithm so as not to be falsely labeled. Think of the race in SEO for an example
If the misinformation identifier uses the content of the information to label misinformation, then the identifier itself is as open to bias and opinion as anyone else
Some of the best spammers have better practices than the legitimate companies sending email.
That was hyperbole on OP’s part.
The algorithm is designed to incentivise the creation and dissemination of attention-grabbing content without considering truthfulness. That simply and directly incentivises misinformation propagation. The fact that politically-disinterested troll groups routinely get incentivised to produce misinformation for clicks is Exhibit A to how deeply Facebook promotes these mechanisms.
Facebook and its employees turn a blind eye to these second-order effects because they are massively profitable. That’s as close to “designed to” as one can get without literally coding for it.
> The algorithm is designed to propagate misinformation like crazy because that's what drives engagement and improves Facebook's metrics.
I would put it like this:
The algorithm design causes the propagation of misinformation like crazy because it optimizes for engagement (which is Facebook's core metric).
The fact the platform(s) generates revenue from this situation doesn't sit well with me.
I'd agree it's not a problem exclusive to Facebook, but a handful of platforms.
That's exactly what algorithmically curated content feeds like Facebook and YouTube recommendations do. They amplify messages to certain people who are susceptible, and there's little awareness until somebody shoots up a mosque and then suddenly we realize there's a whole subculture of people that have semi-willingly brainwashed themselves with conspiracies floating around about white people being "replaced" and think Shariah law is being implemented in Western countries.
I don't think censorship of the content is the right answer. Short of calling for violence, people should obviously be free to propagate conspiracies, alternative history, whatever. The component that I am wary of is the algorithmic curation. It seems to tend towards "you like that? How about this slightly more extreme piece of related content?"