>Obviously the world is better off without insane political nonsense. Then we agree? Filter bubbles are bad? The world would be better off if Facebook changed?

>Obviously the world is better off without insane political nonsense. Then we agree? Filter bubbles are bad? The world would be better off if Facebook changed? >Facebook has probably had hundreds of highly educated and outside-the-box thinking people looking at the Newsfeed. Someone there has thought of and probably tried every approach to improve the quality of their recommendations using the metrics they are interested in. They probably thought of every possible metric to be interested in, and pathologically optimized the metrics they're interested in, long before advertising was the primary way they made money. I'm aware of how optimized it is, but it's built on bad principles. They use a variety of metrics to measure "engagement", including likes, shares, time spent reading a post, comments, hides, etc. But none of these metrics are perfect, and so optimizing for them leads to bad outcomes. The only objectively perfect measure would be to actually ask individuals what articles they want to see more of, or less of, after they read them. To my knowledge they don't do that I think your games analogy is perfect. Facebook games generated huge amounts of engagement and ad money, just like clickbait garbage is doing now. But it was having a negative effect on society, with countless people becoming addicted to clicking cows, and some losing vast amounts of money to their addiction. Facebook chose to sacrifice it for the public good (and their image), and I think they did the right thing.