But that’s not how it actually works. For example, it’s agreed among journalists covering social media that Facebook’s greatest crime is that it “created a geno

But that’s not how it actually works. For example, it’s agreed among journalists covering social media that Facebook’s greatest crime is that it “created a genocide in Myanmar”, as you can read in an ocean of longform articles. What they mean is that people shared hateful messages privately via Messenger and Whatsapp, two services that use a completely deterministic algorithm (“show all incoming messages by recent”). The only practical way to stop this is to employ an army of censors to read private conversations and delete the ones deemed bad. But of course this is also horrible and dystopian. So, as always, it’s trivial to write a scathing critique of Facebook no matter what they do. The problem is that hate doesn’t need an algorithm to amplify it; it can just amplify itself, as it has throughout all of human history. The problem isn’t the algorithm, it’s the people. And you can’t just “fix” people.