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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.

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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.

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