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It's weird to me that that article's headline emphasizes "angry emojis" have 5x higher score than "likes (and repeats it in the first paragraph) and then only lower down explains it's in fact that any emotion emoji (including "love", "care" and "haha") produce a 5x higher score than a simple like.

And it doesn't even explicitly state it, instead saying first "A person was able to react with emojis that correlated to “angry,” “sad,” “haha,” “love” and “wow.”" and then "If a person reacted with an emoji instead of the “like” button, the Facebook algorithm would see the post as five times more valuable and push similar content.", requiring the user to draw an inference that all emojis were treated equally, despite the priming that it only refers to "angry" earlier in the article.

This feels, ironically, like an intentionally inflammatory framing.

Somewhat.

In the Twitter world, there's a concept called getting "Ratioed", which is when your comments exceed the number of retweets / likes.

The idea is (at least on Twitter), "better" posts are roughly the ones that have more eyeballs but fewer reactions. "Getting Ratioed" is a bad thing. You want your tweets to get many eyeballs but not a lot of back-and-forth discussion (as back-and-forth discussion is often a proxy for toxicity)

In contrast: Facebook is clearly of the opinion that "better" posts are the ones where people feel like making a comment on. Surprise surprise, Facebook is beginning to look like the more toxic social network.

While it's true that the article indicates FB views comments as positive signals, that's definitely not the primary focus of it, which is about likes vs "higher intentionality likes + other emotions".

Why award anger at all?

On reddit a post that is downvoted seems to slowly drop at first say -1, then maybe -5 then -6. But then at some point there is a tipping point a frenzy that seems to take over people. The downvotes suddenly are in the -10s then -100s per hour. It's not even on controversial posts it just seems once the hate starts it snowballs at a certain point.

You can tell the mood often by the upvotes to comments ratio. If it has 100 upvotes but 1,000 comments it's most likely a mess of bickering and threats in the comments. But that doesn't seem to necessarily affect the downvote mood but it's likely going to have at least comment one downvoted into oblivion for no reason.

Not all conspiracy theories are created equal.

Some conspiracies theories can be real, as conspiracies are possible.

Dismissing everything as just a "conspiracy theory" is dangerous as it allows those in power to abuse plausible deniability and if anyone questions them they can be labeled a conspiracy theorist easily.

It's reasonable to be curious and want answers. Generally these conspiracies come about when people don't get direct answers or proof to their questions.

Then there are flat earthers, moon landing conspiracists etc that have had evidence (a plane or shining a laser on reflectors on the moon) for awhile and still won't concede, I'd argue they are a very small minority though.

The point is that Facebook has a machine learning algorithm that assigns 5x as many points to ":-(" than to "like".

Sure, conspiracies exist on occasion. But by favoring the "angry" conspiracies over all others, you're still making a negative environment.

I was replying more generically to you. I don't feel like that FB revelation relates to conspiracies at all. It's the same tactic news outlets use, emotional kneejerk stories gets people mad so they keep coming back.

Conspiracy theories have always existed and the jury is out whether they are more prevalent now than in the past. See https://knowablemagazine.org/article/mind/2021/the-enduring-...

But I see social media as a place where people feel permitted to share conspiracy theories. If you engage with social media a lot it seems half the world is crazy. If you only engage with people in real life people are seemingly as sensible as ever, because social conventions force them to mostly keep a lid on things.

> Why are people drawn into conspiracy theories? Because when other people react angrily to a post (angry emoji), that post becomes 5x more popular than if they reacted with a simple like.

You may be partly correct if you only wish to answer your question within the context of Facebook, but more generally I think the belief and propagation of “conspiracy theories” is a symptom of people’s decreasing control over their reality and an inability to understand it.

Why wouldn't people believe the Holocaust happened?

Well, it wasn't too hard to believe that a large political group: the National Socialists of Germany (Nazi for short), got a lot of people to think in a certain manner. Not just in Germany, but also influenced the world (ex: Vichy France, etc. etc.). Such influence extended even into the USA, across the Atlantic.

When those who fell under Nazi influence were told about the horrors of the Holocaust, its not too surprising that they'd deny the claims, because they felt like the Nazis were a good philosophy.

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I dunno. Its not very hard for me to imagine why people fall for conspiracy theories. You feel that a group you're in is getting attacked by another group, and you instinctively defend the group you're a part of.

A Nazi sympathizer will see the Holocaust claims as disinformation, and instinctively defend the Nazi philosophy.

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What is new and interesting, to me, is the speed at which conspiracies seem to spread _today_. It seems faster and more virulent than before. Understanding the mechanisms of social media is probably key.

We've had TV, Newspapers, even "fake news" (called Yellow Journalism in the WW2 era), and propaganda (Dr. Seuss / Disney made lots of wartime propaganda). That's not new at all. People understand that the media manipulates their viewpoints.

I think people have less of an understanding of how social media is shaping our society. Sometimes for the better, but in this topic of conspiracies... for the worse.

> propagation of “conspiracy theories” is a symptom of people’s decreasing control over their reality and an inability to understand it.

I've always thought "conspiracies" were pretty simply this. Some folks have a deep aversion to the idea that things are often just "Yeah, no one really knows what's going on and there's some chaotic things happening". That can apply to genuinely unknowable/chaotic things or just things that are beyond an individuals understanding even if they might be well understood by others.

The idea of meaningless chaos is so revolting that a simple and, very importantly, human source must be what is really happening because then there's someone in control and that is more comforting (despite being a grim state of affairs if true) and sensible.

> But why is it under today's society that conspiracies are getting pushed so hard?

I think that at least part of it is from foreign disinformation campaigns. I can't prove it, so maybe this is just my own conspiracy theory ;-)

(As a semi-serious theory, it wouldn't surprise me if Q was in fact a Russian disinformation campaign.)

It wouldn't surprise me if the moon-landings conspiracy theories were also Russian disinformation campaigns.

Some conspiracies just work too well / too beneficial to the Russian / Soviets worldview.

But yes, conspiracy theories are fun. I'm not against them in general. I'm just against the toxic ones. "The Question" is one of my favorite comic book characters.

> But why is it under today's society that conspiracies are getting pushed so hard?

They spread much faster without any real gatekeeping on them like we had with more centralized media structures. Algorithms tend to be more reactionary (e.g. "devalue QAnon posts") so they're perpetually lagging behind whatever the current conspiracy flavor of the week is.

Couple that with, IMO, a mental health crisis the likes we haven't seen in a long time and existing addictive habits created by social media companies chasing engagement. It's hard to pin the blame on any one party here. At some level, misinformation spread is fueled by people who want to believe this sort of thing, or feel like they need to be seen sharing the right type of information, correctness be damned.

The best way out for many folks is some time away from the platforms, self-reflection, and filling the void that is being met by conspiracy theories.