Facebook and Twitter algorithms incentivize 'people to get enraged'

Social media is entertainment. News is entertainment.

If you want to get informed, read a book written by an expert or someone with real life experience.

Don't forget about the dozens of powermods who enable other subreddits to transform into political echo chambers. A great example is r/InsanePeopleFacebook turning into a showcase of Donald Trump and Tomi Lahren tweets.

Try /r/stupidpol, that's good for political discussion from all sides - though it's a Marxist sub, it welcomes discussion and debate from other points of view.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if mods of popular subreddit were actually paid for doing this, looking at r/all or r/popular always feels like an astroturfing operation.

It's quite common. Moderation is a bit of a thankless job so help is always welcome and in a power-grab honesty and hard-work become negatives, trumped by the ability to lie shamelessly and ceaselessly.

Many women's subreddits, especially if they're for lesbians, are entirely moderated by men. The ones that weren't were slandered off of Reddit.

A reasonable explanation might be that the ppl who write these articles don't use it lol, as well as the people in congress who write regulations they report on.

They use Twitter and their parents use Facebook. Any article I've seen on reddit treats it as closer to 4chan than Twitter.

Reminds me how some forums aren't allowed to have apps in the App Store due to porn, as well as the Tumblr porn controversy. Reddit has more porn and NSFW content than almost anywhere else.

Reddit is owned by Advanced Publications, a media company.

Facebook and Google are sucking all the profits from old media - Reddit is their hedge against that. Of course they don't complain.

Reddit doesn't make any money. Nobody wants to advertise to that user base, hence the endless redesigns.

R/The_Donald got a ton of press coverage and discussion to the point where it was shut down, whereas the left leaning ragebait subs do not. Why is this do you think? Why do you think facebook gets so much press attention?

Possibly because reddit's owned by Advance Publications...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications

A company that owns a fair amount of media outlets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Advance_subsidiaries

Why would they report anything bad about themselves?

On Reddit:

1. Many posts & comments are still longer than 3 half-lines, which is the upper limit of what a journalist can read (journalists like the 'journalists' who spend their time looking for something juicy on Twitter/FB).

2. Famous, bankable, known people are less identifiable.

It could also be due to how awful the new user experience is on Reddit. A journalist would be instantly turned off to using it as a source.

If you haven't seen it in a while, using a new browser or incognito mode, view reddit without logging in. It is an absolutely awful experience. The content you see as a new user is basically all memes and you are blasted with trending content on top of the card based feed.

It is, and I encourage everyone to do that, but I don't think it's a systemic solution. After all, Facebook and Twitter offer ways to curate your feed too.

There's a difference between an algorithm maximizing engagement even if it means pushing you to read outrage articles and folks on a subreddit saying negative things about politicians you like.

Reddit is the only social media that falls so low as to regularly display lynchings and beatings on the front page. "JusticeServed", and other cheap justifications for violence. Reddit and Twitter the biggest dumps of the internet.

"dislike" buttons can be extremely powerful tools for enforcing groupthink.

I think you downplay how much this affects reddit. Hot-topic issues shift from 55/45 popularity splits (where the minority view is present, but usually overshadowed) to 10/0 when you net out up and downvotes. It gives a sense of single-mindedness in a community where the majority view in truth only barely edges out the others.

> I haven’t seen the frontpage you’re talking about in years and I doubt many users do.

It's the default page for anyone who isn't logged in (most likely a majority of users, or at least a large fraction). And I'd be willing to bet at least half of logged in users only have the default subs.

This might be true on more civilized "niche" communities, but the split on the default front page is roughly 50/40/10% ragebait/meme/substantive content, and I use the word "substantive" very generously.

This is only partially true: in prior media eras, low-quality journalism was notorious for doing what Facebook and Twitter are now.

We only notice it because we've come out of an almost century long period in which the most effective broadcast mechanism was regulated by the FCC. This is an accident of engineering; the only reason why the FCC was even allowed to what is blatant government censorship is because of the scarcity of radio spectrum. This died the moment cable news networks became widespread. The only restriction on what, say, Fox News, CNN, or MSNBC can publish is their carriage agreement with the cable companies, which usually just dictates genre, not content. Social media is that but laundered across millions of users who "choose" what to share and like out of what platform algorithms recommend.

Prior to television, there was radio, which was also regulated under a similar regime. However, newspapers ruled the roost before that, and they had practically no limits on speech save for extremely weak defamation laws. They also were instrumental in spreading a lot of outright bullshit. "Yellow journalism" is an anagram of "clickbait", after all; and the press were perfectly happy to engage in exactly the same tactics we see today... for pretty much the same reasons. Selling lurid descriptions of political foes and foreign threats makes more money than level-headed explanations of the same controversies.

I'm not sure if either scenario could be described as "good". The FCC effectively engaged in a soft censorship regime through the means of spectrum scarcity. This meant that every information passed through [the five filters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model) of ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak, and (at the time) anti-Communism. On the other hand, it's clearly obvious that a good subset of any group of political ideologues is either incapable of or uninterested in making level-headed assessments about themselves. Self-critique is heresy in the eyes of someone more extreme than you are, and we live in times where the extremes might be right about at least one thing.

Perfect example is the recent Harry/Megan interview with Oprah where social melt down over it. In the interview Megan said she had not talked to her sister in some 10 years and grew up an "only child" and barely knew her. She also said her sister changed her name when she found out she was engaged to Harry. an off handed insult.

The counter story is getting very little press right now, allowing her blatant lies to be spread without any scrutiny. Inside Edition interviewed her sister and her sister brought proof she was lying:

She said: ‘I don’t know how she can say I don’t know her and she was an only child. We’ve got photographs over a lifespan of us together. So how can she not know me?’ The US broadcaster showed four images of Meghan and Samantha together during the clip. Two were from when the duchess was a baby, another from when she was a small child and the last and most recent from Samantha’s graduation, 13 years ago in 2008.

Samantha also disputed Meghan’s claim that she only changed her surname back to Markle after the royal struck up a romance with Harry in 2016. ‘She changed her last name back to Markle… only when I started dating Harry. So I think that says enough,’ Meghan told Oprah. But Samantha hit back: ‘I was a Markle before she was.. Markle has always been my name.’ Samantha then showed Inside Edition her petition to change her name that was dated back to December 1997 and her college diploma, which says Samantha M. Markle.

This is a fairly non-political, pop culture example, but it highlights the fact lies spread so much faster than the truth, that actually finding the truth is nearly impossible. For me, there are no facts anymore, its all about the narrative now. Whoever controls the narrative, controls the "truth".

Yes they do! There isn’t that much difference nowadays between cable news and edgy YT personalities. Old guard media has realized that they can’t compete with social media so they’re borrowing all the plays.

There is news in the newspaper and in the archives of news sites but what’s front and center is outrage bait opinion pieces from large personalities.

This is a key insight.

Tabloid Journalism is known to be sensational and easily dismissed as such because of the medium, and that people in our social circles don't often peddle anything more than the latest celebrity/sports gossip.

Social Media has allowed mis/disinformation to become more credible by both the scale of distribution for that content, and the increasing that contents trustworthiness by highlighting engagement from people in our social circles.

Social media also enrages at a much deeper level.

Say a newspaper printed something. You read it. You got angry. You wrote a letter to the editor and mailed it. Maybe a week later, they printed your letter. A few days later, someone you know saw your letter and commented to you that they thought you were right.

You see something on Facebook. You got angry. You wrote something in reply (perhaps with less thought than the letter to the editor, because it wasn't a once-every-few-years event). Five minutes later, likes comments start pouring in. Not just one person tells you they think you were right; ten people do. And they tell you in the next few minutes and hours, not days later. And they comment on each others' comments about your post.

You get massively more positive reinforcement for your outrage now than you did with newspapers. The outrage gets reinforced, socially ratified. You get praised for it.

It's not just that Facebook hands you more things to be outraged about (not all of them true). It's that the outrage takes much deeper hold in you, because it's reinforced so much.

This was apparently a recognised KGB propaganda method abroad. Sponsor semi-respectable news sources, and have them quote arbitrarily unreliable articles from elsewhere. Literally information laundering.

I read about it somewhere in an article about ZeroHedge practices, I can't quite find a link now.

EDIT: link: https://streetwiseprofessor.com/how-do-you-know-that-zero-he...

Yeah. Newspapers after some time develop reputation. So you buy X, but you wouldn't touch Y, no matter the headline.

Then "social media" take a bit of this and a bit of that, and put it all next to each other.

People say this a lot, and forget that (a) libel is pretty limited in the US and (b) expensive everywhere and (c) despite being much heavier in the UK still does not restrain our awful press from campaigns of harassment against celebrities they deem appropriate targets for malicious gossip.

I would say The New York Times falsely claiming that Iraq had WMD and helping to champion the Iraq war was far more damaging than anything that has happened on social media.

The MSM may steer clear of the obvious falsehoods like vaportrails/5g mind control, but the misinformation they do provide is extra dangerous, especially when it's a joint effort with the government.

> “If it bleeds, it leads!”

This slogan refers to sensational violence (car crashes, murders, earthquakes), not content that inflames readers ideologically. Maybe it's tawdry in its own way, but it does not seem nearly so polarizing to me.

I actually don't think the libelous stuff is what is driving most of the polarization, but rather its the rage-generating content like the "war on christmas". And it's not just news sources on the right, this recent NYT article is clearly not national news worthy, except to drive engagement / enragement (just look at the URL they chose): https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/08/us/stewart-allen-clark-pa...

Ehh. He's either in the culture war, or he believes what he says. If you're a Brit you probably see the royal family fairly positively. (Many brits don't like them as people, but think they're handling the transfer of power well, etc.)

His factual correctness and his sincerity are two different things. Who knows what MM is, at heart, but if he has reason to see her negatively why shouldn't he lament her influence over his country?

Is there a time-limit, where you're only allowed to criticize someone for 5y, and so when it hit 6 his opinion was officially stale?

It looks like they delegate (or have formerly delegated) this type of intention, to paying customers. That of course doesn't mean the userbase: you'd call it 'advertisers' but Facebook got in some trouble over selling off extremely granular access to targeted advertising, to state actors, foreign governments etc: basically whoever's willing to pay enough.

So, if you're trying to create domestic terrorists, it's extremely valuable to be fed information just like your example represents, to sell off access to that demographic.

Facebook doesn't have to consider it 'provocative content', they see it as 'feeding a demographic to a paying customer'. If you're smart enough about your targeting, you can turn it to 'provoke susceptible people into committing acts of terrorism at rates substantially higher than the baseline likelihood of this'. So it's the foreign intelligence agency that is thinking of 'provoking', and Facebook sort of shrugs and fills the order for targeted demographics, without itself thinking much about whether anything is 'provocative'.

Universities. The incentives are well aligned and there are plenty of labs doing research in this space.

I'm not aware of any information suggesting that Facebook's engagement algorithms specifically were responsible for this. The criticisms in this article are about how Facebook needs to ban certain categories of violent content, not simply tweak the newsfeed to deprioritize them.

In short, Tocqueville's notion was that democracy works in America (in contrast to the 1st Republic) because we Americans handle almost everything at as local a level as possible and are willing to get along and work together to do what needs to be done; social media outrage has brought local matters to the national scope and has made us uncompromising enemies, rather than allies, of our neighbors, which has crippled our ability to productively and effectively deal with governmental and political matters. I.E., the article regards a decline in the efficacy of democracy in America rather than a decline in the practice of democracy in America.