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Facebook is obsessed with optimizing for engagement. If you tend to engage with things that make you angry or are against your world-view, Facebook will show yo

Facebook is obsessed with optimizing for engagement. If you tend to engage with things that make you angry or are against your world-view, Facebook will show you more of it. I've personally seen this when I commented on a cop killing video. Over the next few weeks I was shown a lot of the same thing, I assume because their machine learning algorithm had found out I had engaged with it before and was goaded me to engage again. Some people don't engage in that kind of content and as you'd expect they don't see it. I'm not sure what's worse, deliberate filtering or self-filtering.

mrweasel 10y ago
People don't like to be proven wrong, or even presented with the possibility that they might be wrong, so we seek out people and media that validate our existing beliefs. Facebook just makes it a little easier by filtering things out you would engage with anyway. Facebook isn't doing this to make our life more comfortable, not directly at least. It's a just a side effect of being obsessed with user engagement. By removing the things the user doesn't like, Facebook increases the chance that the user will stay on the site, and view more ads. So many fail to understand that Facebook is a business, with all that entails. It's not a question of Facebook, or Mark Zuckerberg, being good or evil. It's purely about profitability of Facebook. If more people could understand that, then maybe they would be less outraged when ever Facebook makes changes.
- loganmhb 10y ago
  Just because Facebook is making these decisions based on profitability doesn't remove them from the moral sphere, though. If the side effects of the decisions Facebook makes are substantial (which seems common to me with ad-based business models) people are perfectly justified in being outraged because of those side effects, regardless of whether the decisions are good for Facebook's profits.
- deleted 10y ago
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mrweasel 10y ago

People don't like to be proven wrong, or even presented with the possibility that they might be wrong, so we seek out people and media that validate our existing beliefs. Facebook just makes it a little easier by filtering things out you would engage with anyway. Facebook isn't doing this to make our life more comfortable, not directly at least. It's a just a side effect of being obsessed with user engagement. By removing the things the user doesn't like, Facebook increases the chance that the user will stay on the site, and view more ads. So many fail to understand that Facebook is a business, with all that entails. It's not a question of Facebook, or Mark Zuckerberg, being good or evil. It's purely about profitability of Facebook. If more people could understand that, then maybe they would be less outraged when ever Facebook makes changes.

loganmhb 10y ago
Just because Facebook is making these decisions based on profitability doesn't remove them from the moral sphere, though. If the side effects of the decisions Facebook makes are substantial (which seems common to me with ad-based business models) people are perfectly justified in being outraged because of those side effects, regardless of whether the decisions are good for Facebook's profits.
deleted 10y ago
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