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Re: Facebook makes the world a worse place

Posted: Fri Oct 30, 2020 9:13 pm
by Jonathan
https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-vo ... arization/

Research shows repeated Facebook use drives users to more extreme content than Reddit.

Re: Facebook makes the world a worse place

Posted: Mon Nov 02, 2020 6:09 am
by quantus
I'd really like to highlight this article and what it says (emphasis mine):
In fact, we have now learned that executives were even shown a slide presentation that highlighted the impact of the second iteration on about a dozen specific publishers—and Mother Jones was singled out as one that would suffer, while the conservative site the Daily Wire was identified as one that would benefit. These changes were pushed by Republican operatives working in Facebook’s Washington office under Vice President of Global Public Policy Joel Kaplan (who later made headlines for demonstratively supporting his friend Brett Kavanaugh during confirmation hearings).

Asked for comment, Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone would only say, “We did not make changes with the intent of impacting individual publishers. We only made updates after they were reviewed by many different teams across many disciplines to ensure the rationale was clear and consistent and could be explained to all publishers.”

Glossed over in that non-answer answer is the fact that the changes were made with at least the knowledge of the disparate impact they would have on specific publishers. And that those changes appear to have been based, at least in part, on internal partisan concerns.

Stone would not comment on the slide deck. But according to someone who has seen it, it contained bar graphs indicating how much reach various news organizations would gain or lose under the revamped algorithm. One chart showed the Daily Wire, a site headed by conservative pundit Ben Shapiro that routinely shares false claims and malignant ideas (being transgender is a “delusion,” abortion providers are “assassins,” US Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., is not “loyal to America”). Another graph showed Mother Jones, whose rigorously fact-checked investigative work has garnered many of journalism’s highest awards, including—just months before that Facebook presentation—being honored as Magazine of the Year at our industry’s version of the Academy Awards.

Allow us to pause briefly while we scream out of the window.

Re: Facebook makes the world a worse place

Posted: Wed Mar 17, 2021 4:29 pm
by Jonathan
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/0 ... formation/
Facebook leadership has also repeatedly weakened or halted many initiatives meant to clean up misinformation on the platform because doing so would undermine that growth.
Pretty damning.

Re: Facebook makes the world a worse place

Posted: Mon Sep 27, 2021 5:29 pm
by Jonathan

Re: Facebook makes the world a worse place

Posted: Mon Oct 25, 2021 10:34 pm
by Jonathan
https://newrepublic.com/article/164142/ ... ond-repair
It’s hard to think of a more damning determination: Facebook’s product inevitably led to the spread of hate speech and misinformation.