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I think social media that prioritizes engagement just pushes people to whatever extreme they have a potential proclivity for.

Oh, you like x? How about you stay on our site and check out this whole series of content that people like you get really emotional about and can't stop clicking on.

It leads inexorably to extreme content.

Your last point rings true.

What’s the solution here? Prevent companies from using engagement as a metric? Do you want to be recommended random 13-views videos on YouTube? Because that’s what you get.

I don’t know if I’d like to lose good recommendation algorithms because of bad apples. However I don’t like bad apples either, they rot the whole batch.

Sadly I don't know a good solution either, and I'm with you that it's not all bad. It's a complex problem for sure.

We might consider more or less eliminating automated recommendation systems on social media and return to, as you put it, "just showing photos of puppies", i.e. just showing posts from entities that you have explicitly friended or followed. This won't entirely solve the problem of people coalescing into radical groups, but it might help if learning about the group required someone posting it to their feed for everyone to see.

The flip side is when your friends on the platform don't have enough interest in whatever interest of yours you're trying to learn more about... You go browsing groups and it needs to be sorted/ordered/tailored/suggested somehow unless you want some useless thing like alphabetical order. Should I join A1% Landscaping or Aaron's Aardvarks?

So a search engine?

Having the list be seeded by your own thoughts means you're still sort of in your bubble. I'm talking about the (important, IMHO) use case of wandering through the world seeing what presents itself. Perhaps ordering by popularity makes sense (simply skip to page nnnn to discover unpopular groups) but that feels like it would also have downsides.

I don’t think recommendations are the only thing at fault here. You just need your uncle Frank to share a chemtrail article and someone will like it and reshare it. Maybe someone will start a chemtrail group and invite your uncle.

I think the engine speeds up discovery even for people who don’t have many connections, but if you’re already googling chemtrails chances are you’ll find your group.

Let’s not forget that 4chan has no recommendations, yet...

Sure. There is no way to eliminate whacko conspiracy theorists and fringe forums. They existed before social media too. The idea is that interpersonal dynamics can help manage these things: if your uncle Frank posts about chemtrails, then hopefully someone he trusts can point him in a different direction in the comments, and if not, at least the people reading it will see the comments. If Facebook just surfaces this information, you get none of this: click and boom you're in an alternative reality full of lizard people and humans in cosmic battle.

> Is it possible to curate all of Facebook’s content?

Here's perhaps a better question:

If it's not feasible for a social space to be maintained in some semblance of good order because of its size, should that space even exist?

Do extremely horizontal social networks provide value to society proportional to the harms they seem to cause, and that the people who build them seem either unwilling or unable to stop?

I'd also pose this question about narrowly targeted advertising, which of course goes hand in hand with enabling these platforms to exist.

Things don't necessarily have to exist just because they can.

There are plenty of large groups that people derive social value from, maybe even most.

Unfortunately, Facebook mirrors human society and gives bad/profit-driven actors an easier avenue than traditional recruiting and distribution.

Most things are good/neutral, but scale means some things will go south

> There are plenty of large groups that people derive social value from, maybe even most.

I'm not sure what you mean here. Do you mean groups on facebook or that there are other groups on the scale of facebook people (ie. a user count in the billions) derive value from?

For the first, in the absence of facebook these groups would no doubt still exist. There were forums before facebook and some of them grew quite large. There were even regional social networks on smaller scales (I worked for one once).

If you mean the latter, well, I don't think that's really true. In so far as it is, there are only really a couple that aren't just owned by facebook to begin with.

> in the absence of facebook these groups would no doubt still exist.

I don’t think they would.

Creation, discovery, participation, following. None of these is particularly easy if you revert to forums and Google. I won’t join Cute Puppies Forum but I wouldn’t mind following an homonymous group on Facebook for a little while, maybe I’ll answer some questions too.

The average Joe won’t care enough to join their little city group, but Facebook makes it so easy that you find all kinds of non-tech people on it, ready to answer your questions (and sometimes insult you, but I block those on sight).

I don't think we really know what kind of social spaces would have evolved in a world where something like facebook didn't or couldn't grow. I think there were some hints of it evolving in the early 2000s, but when facebook blew up it just sucked ALL the air out of the room and forums and blogs all got stuck in 2009.

Maybe I'm wrong, but again I have to ask the question: Are those conveniences actually worth the harm we see from aggressive narrow ad targeting/tracking, as well as the issues mentioned here around parasitic viral memes, that make things like facebook even viable as businesses?

This is an evaluation we are allowed to make, and it's not a foregone conclusion that just because people can build these things they have a place in our society.

I’d rather keep my Facebook groups and have Facebook manually quarantine misinformation groups and pages instead, in a way similar to how Reddit does it.

I don’t think we should reduce public liberties because some people take advantage of them. I’d rather punish/limit them instead.

Ok, so who's going to accurately quarantine misinformation among the trillions of posts being made by billions of people? How many moderators does it take to do that effectively? Likely a few orders of magnitude more than facebook employs.

Anyways, no "public liberties" are unlimited. All are constrained where leaving them open creates significant harm or burdens other people's liberties. Even free speech and freedom of association.

People understood that once. "All my freedoms are absolute and who cares if society falls down with them" is a modern construct and it seems pretty plain to me that it's resulted in a lot of problems.

Perhaps what it comes down to is a confidence interval, and the broad overconfidence of tech companies when their product meets the real world. There's nothing inherently wrong with saying "oh, you like X, maybe you should try Y".

The problem comes in when you're too focused on providing the Y suggestions, in my opinion. There's a general overconfidence in the tech industry, particularly in advertising, and even more so in social media targeted advertising, that the suggestions that they make are actually useful to society as well as individuals.

I'm not saying that they're wrong about it, but I am saying that just because the previous status quo was "no measurement, trust us, it works" in the TV/radio/billboards era, and now you're bringing in "look, we measured it!" doesn't inherently mean that you are correct about that measurement, or that it is the right thing to measure in the first place. Perhaps the old status quo factored in innumerable intangible social factors that could then somehow translate into tangible results that you're not capturing in your new metrics.

The economics of the social advertising industry are wholly untied from providing genuine value, and this manifests itself in myriad ways: you're only seeing a symptom of it here.

It’s pretty clear that the numbers show that Facebook directly facilitates extremism through their recommendation system.

I don’t know whether that’s been proven, but I’ve always assumed it’s because controversy and rage fuels interactions, therefore Facebook “likes” the content. There’s a difference between numbers and human recommendations “tweaks” by Facebook themselves.

To be clear I don’t think FB is using humans to manually facilitate this. They develop and own the algorithms that do. They are directly responsible for the negative effects of that which facilitate extremists as their own research presented here demonstrates.

A better way to put it is that Facebook let it happen rather than make it happen.

I don’t know whether Facebook is directly responsible any more than Jonh Walker is directly responsible for car accidents. In both cases it’s the product’s troublesome users that are awful beings.

Perhaps we just need legislation like we have for alcohol, which doesn’t eliminate the problem but certainly reduces it.

If I know someone has a heroin habit, and I know they thus would buy some heroin off me if I offer them some, is it responsible of me to offer them heroin, since they want it?

But, you see, it is not me who is offering the heroin, it is just this machine which guesses the user's preferences...

What you’re suggesting is moderation. Someone has to tell Facebook that heroin is bad.

From what I see Facebook already implements automated content detection but you know it’s not perfect, content slips through and it’s often in the gray area.

Would you like your account to be blocked because you joked about something? Bots don’t have sense of humor.

Do you want some ibuprofen? Sorry, that’s a drug. Request dropped.

(Heck I’m even afraid this comment gets marked as spam because of the keywords)

I think the focus of the discussion is not deplatforming content, but tackling the extremism rabbit hole Facebook is causing people to fall into because of its suggestions system.

Of course I wouldn't like my account to be blocked because I posted a slightly edgy joke. But would we care if an edgy memes page gets marked as unsuitable for recommendations? Probably no. Would it be a problem if Facebook blocked an Ibuprofen ad to some users that are deemed as not suitable? I wouldn't care, in all honesty.

If limiting the extremism slippery slope of targeted reccomendations requires to mark extremist content as unsuitable for reccomendation, then I personally wouldn't mind. Facebook already does it to some extent, but its algorithms are either not good enough, or driven predominantly by other factors

Stopping recommendations altogether is another option. The internet worked perfectly fine before algorithmic recommendation.