19 ms·

Facebook: 64% of the time users join extremist groups, the platform told them to

username90 6y ago
The header makes it seem like Facebook said this themselves, but it doesn't seem to be the case.
- mxxx 6y ago
  The article states that the number comes from a study that Facebook themselves undertook.
- jakelazaroff 6y ago
  The figure comes from research conducted by Facebook: > Facebook’s own research revealed that 64 percent of the time a person joins an extremist Facebook Group, they do so because the platform recommended it. > Facebook has also acknowledged that pages and groups associated with QAnon extremism had at least 3 million members, meaning Facebook helped radicalize 2 million people.
  - true_religion 6y ago
    I know it’s just a quote but I have to point out that’s not how statistics work. You can’t say 64% of a group were radicalized because 64% of people will join a group suggested by Facebook. In fact all 3 million of those users could have had the group suggested by Facebook.
asiando 6y ago
I still don’t know what to make of this information. Assuming that Facebook isn’t an evil entity that favors chaos, all I see is plain numbers: People who like X also like this group. I’m a reasonable user of Facebook groups and I sometimes join new groups. I’m currently part of about 20 groups but I rarely participate. Why hasn’t Facebook suggested extreme groups to me? All I get is travel and buy/sell/rent groups. Is Facebook being good to me and bad to others? Or are bad/gullible people liking all kinds of stuff that leads them into the rabbit hole? Is it Facebook’s responsibility to curate all the content on the platform or are we just asking them to clean up some trash? Is it possible to curate all of Facebook’s content? Would you like a platform where everything you share is curated? Would you use an email provider that blocked emails you might find interesting? I’m not justifying what’s happening, but I don’t really understand what people expect of such a platform and whether they’d like it more if it just showed photos of puppies.
- meheleventyone 6y ago
  It’s pretty clear that the numbers show that Facebook directly facilitates extremism through their recommendation system.
  - asiando 6y ago
    I don’t know whether that’s been proven, but I’ve always assumed it’s because controversy and rage fuels interactions, therefore Facebook “likes” the content. There’s a difference between numbers and human recommendations “tweaks” by Facebook themselves.
    - meheleventyone 6y ago
      To be clear I don’t think FB is using humans to manually facilitate this. They develop and own the algorithms that do. They are directly responsible for the negative effects of that which facilitate extremists as their own research presented here demonstrates.
      - asiando 6y ago
        A better way to put it is that Facebook let it happen rather than make it happen. I don’t know whether Facebook is directly responsible any more than Jonh Walker is directly responsible for car accidents. In both cases it’s the product’s troublesome users that are awful beings. Perhaps we just need legislation like we have for alcohol, which doesn’t eliminate the problem but certainly reduces it.
- cyrus_ 6y ago
  We might consider more or less eliminating automated recommendation systems on social media and return to, as you put it, "just showing photos of puppies", i.e. just showing posts from entities that you have explicitly friended or followed. This won't entirely solve the problem of people coalescing into radical groups, but it might help if learning about the group required someone posting it to their feed for everyone to see.
diveanon 6y ago
Facebook built a radicalization engine, and they should be held accountable for the radicals it creates. This isn't even new, Facebook facilitated a genocide in Myanmar that everyone seems to forget about. What will it take for society to acknowledge that Facebook was a massive mistake run by amoral sociopaths?
redis_mlc 6y ago
The article doesn't add anything to the discourse, since it doesn't have any meaningful data or analysis. If you're going to call a one-day march "insurrection", then what do you call burning downtowns for months? Also, voting Republican is not joining an extremist group, it's democracy. There are actual radical groups, but the article doesn't talk about those.
kerng 6y ago
That's what is called the echo chamber... slowly sliding into it with Facebook's engineering help. What it leads to, we were able to witness yesterday.
- throwaway201103 6y ago
  We've been witnessing it for at least a year.
  - Shared404 6y ago
    But yesterday was enough for even those in denial to see it.
    - throwaway201103 6y ago
      I guess that depends on what they were denying. The Wired article is entirely about Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, et. al. facilitating extremism on the right, when certainly the reality is that they are facilitating it wherever they can get engagement, on either side of the political spectrum. I mean since October they basically shut down a lot of content that was very much right-of-center. Alex Jones was deplatformed a long time ago.
  - bostik 6y ago
    For quite a bit longer, I think. The book Weapons of Math Destruction was published in 2016, and the conclusions therein were not exactly new at the time either.[ß] The business model of ad-based social media is focused on generating engagement, above all else. Nothing generates more engagement than outrage, fear, or playing to primal instincts. To satisfy that demand, content providers are encouraged to generate the maximal outrage and foment fear. Social media platforms are incentivised to direct people towards that content, because they make more money that way. The end result: social media platforms automate pile-on and radicalisation at the speed of lies, at global scale. Not because they are inherently evil, but because they are making money off of people being inherently terrible. ß: The real meat of the book is in the first two chapters, as far as I'm concerned. Everything else in there is just repeating the arguments.
breck 6y ago
#AbolishCopyright. Allow people to freely share information with each other and you will allow decentralization to happen. You will stop subsidizing lies. That is the answer. It really is as simple as that (not easy, but simple).
Proven 6y ago
Or: the platform failed to identify as many as 36% of users who wanted to join various groups often incorrectly referred to as extremist.
FalconSensei 6y ago
On another news: most of the time I joined non-extremist groups, it was also Facebooks suggestions. If I create an account and join 2 groups about dogs, facebook is going to start suggesting groups about dogs...
shiado 6y ago
It's clear social media companies are in over their heads. I'm glad I don't use them and they need serious oversight. Just today Twitter allowed the promotion of genocide on what they would consider to be their tightly moderated platform https://twitter.com/chineseembinus/status/1347247602094534658 https://twitter.com/chineseembinus/status/134724760209453465...
Rebelgecko 6y ago
If you follow the links, the "64%" statistic is from data that is at least 5 years old. Are there more recent #s? A lot has changed in the last 5 years. I'd also argue that "Facebook: We told them to join these groups" is a misleading take, since it's not a quote from Facebook and it's twisting their words. I guess "64% of Facebook users joined groups via recommendations" isn't sexy enough of a headline. It's interesting that no one mentions the percentage for non-extremist groups. Assuming the omission is intentional, I wouldn't be surprised if the rate for rate for extremist groups is actually lower than for nonextremist groups
dang 6y ago
Editorializing titles like this is against the site guidelines and will cause you to lose submission privileges on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html In this case it's tricky because the article's own title is baity, so the HN guidelines call for changing it: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait". But they add "don't editorialize". Cherry-picking a detail out of the article and making it the title is the leading form of editorializing. When an original title is baity or misleading, the way to rewrite it is to find representative language from somewhere else in the article—something that accurately and neutrally represents what it is about. There's nearly always something there that's suitable: it might be in the HTML doc title, the URL, a subheading, the first paragraph...sometimes even a photo caption. Separately from the title, this article is an op-ed that doesn't add any significant information and is therefore not a good HN submission, especially not on a topic du jour like this one, which is generating hundreds of different articles.
- hunter2_ 6y ago
  I like these rules, and you do great work keeping things on track. This scenario got me thinking, though: what if all but one thing in an article falls into the "doesn't add any significant information and is therefore not a good HN submission" bucket? Is it better to move on without discussing it here because we only discuss complete works, or is there a mechanism to have this community discuss just one particular fact that unfortunately doesn't have a URL dedicated to it? Actually, it would have a URL dedicated to it if the submitter used a `#:~:text=` fragment.
  - pvg 6y ago
    The standard mechanism you'll find in the dangworks is you submit the thing and write a (almost certainly first) comment about that one interesting thing. You get to steer the discussion somewhat but not frame it entirely.
  - throwaway201103 6y ago
    I would say, submit the article with a neturalized title, then post a comment highlighting the interesting fact to start the discussion. Edit: sorry pvg, your comment wasn't there when I started to post mine.
refurb 6y ago
Anyone have an unbiased, objective definition of extremist group? I mean, if I join PETA, does that count? Or Black Israelites Facebook page?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ashleshbiradar 6y ago
again, we should focus more on education than moderation.

The header makes it seem like Facebook said this themselves, but it doesn't seem to be the case.

mxxx 6y ago
The article states that the number comes from a study that Facebook themselves undertook.
jakelazaroff 6y ago
The figure comes from research conducted by Facebook: > Facebook’s own research revealed that 64 percent of the time a person joins an extremist Facebook Group, they do so because the platform recommended it. > Facebook has also acknowledged that pages and groups associated with QAnon extremism had at least 3 million members, meaning Facebook helped radicalize 2 million people.
- true_religion 6y ago
  I know it’s just a quote but I have to point out that’s not how statistics work. You can’t say 64% of a group were radicalized because 64% of people will join a group suggested by Facebook. In fact all 3 million of those users could have had the group suggested by Facebook.

I still don’t know what to make of this information. Assuming that Facebook isn’t an evil entity that favors chaos, all I see is plain numbers: People who like X also like this group. I’m a reasonable user of Facebook groups and I sometimes join new groups. I’m currently part of about 20 groups but I rarely participate. Why hasn’t Facebook suggested extreme groups to me? All I get is travel and buy/sell/rent groups. Is Facebook being good to me and bad to others? Or are bad/gullible people liking all kinds of stuff that leads them into the rabbit hole? Is it Facebook’s responsibility to curate all the content on the platform or are we just asking them to clean up some trash? Is it possible to curate all of Facebook’s content? Would you like a platform where everything you share is curated? Would you use an email provider that blocked emails you might find interesting? I’m not justifying what’s happening, but I don’t really understand what people expect of such a platform and whether they’d like it more if it just showed photos of puppies.

meheleventyone 6y ago
It’s pretty clear that the numbers show that Facebook directly facilitates extremism through their recommendation system.
- asiando 6y ago
  I don’t know whether that’s been proven, but I’ve always assumed it’s because controversy and rage fuels interactions, therefore Facebook “likes” the content. There’s a difference between numbers and human recommendations “tweaks” by Facebook themselves.
  - meheleventyone 6y ago
    To be clear I don’t think FB is using humans to manually facilitate this. They develop and own the algorithms that do. They are directly responsible for the negative effects of that which facilitate extremists as their own research presented here demonstrates.
    - asiando 6y ago
      A better way to put it is that Facebook let it happen rather than make it happen. I don’t know whether Facebook is directly responsible any more than Jonh Walker is directly responsible for car accidents. In both cases it’s the product’s troublesome users that are awful beings. Perhaps we just need legislation like we have for alcohol, which doesn’t eliminate the problem but certainly reduces it.
cyrus_ 6y ago
We might consider more or less eliminating automated recommendation systems on social media and return to, as you put it, "just showing photos of puppies", i.e. just showing posts from entities that you have explicitly friended or followed. This won't entirely solve the problem of people coalescing into radical groups, but it might help if learning about the group required someone posting it to their feed for everyone to see.

diveanon 6y ago

Facebook built a radicalization engine, and they should be held accountable for the radicals it creates. This isn't even new, Facebook facilitated a genocide in Myanmar that everyone seems to forget about. What will it take for society to acknowledge that Facebook was a massive mistake run by amoral sociopaths?

redis_mlc 6y ago

The article doesn't add anything to the discourse, since it doesn't have any meaningful data or analysis. If you're going to call a one-day march "insurrection", then what do you call burning downtowns for months? Also, voting Republican is not joining an extremist group, it's democracy. There are actual radical groups, but the article doesn't talk about those.

kerng 6y ago

That's what is called the echo chamber... slowly sliding into it with Facebook's engineering help. What it leads to, we were able to witness yesterday.

throwaway201103 6y ago
We've been witnessing it for at least a year.
- Shared404 6y ago
  But yesterday was enough for even those in denial to see it.
  - throwaway201103 6y ago
    I guess that depends on what they were denying. The Wired article is entirely about Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, et. al. facilitating extremism on the right, when certainly the reality is that they are facilitating it wherever they can get engagement, on either side of the political spectrum. I mean since October they basically shut down a lot of content that was very much right-of-center. Alex Jones was deplatformed a long time ago.
- bostik 6y ago
  For quite a bit longer, I think. The book Weapons of Math Destruction was published in 2016, and the conclusions therein were not exactly new at the time either.[ß] The business model of ad-based social media is focused on generating engagement, above all else. Nothing generates more engagement than outrage, fear, or playing to primal instincts. To satisfy that demand, content providers are encouraged to generate the maximal outrage and foment fear. Social media platforms are incentivised to direct people towards that content, because they make more money that way. The end result: social media platforms automate pile-on and radicalisation at the speed of lies, at global scale. Not because they are inherently evil, but because they are making money off of people being inherently terrible. ß: The real meat of the book is in the first two chapters, as far as I'm concerned. Everything else in there is just repeating the arguments.

breck 6y ago

#AbolishCopyright. Allow people to freely share information with each other and you will allow decentralization to happen. You will stop subsidizing lies. That is the answer. It really is as simple as that (not easy, but simple).

Proven 6y ago

Or: the platform failed to identify as many as 36% of users who wanted to join various groups often incorrectly referred to as extremist.

FalconSensei 6y ago

On another news: most of the time I joined non-extremist groups, it was also Facebooks suggestions. If I create an account and join 2 groups about dogs, facebook is going to start suggesting groups about dogs...

shiado 6y ago

It's clear social media companies are in over their heads. I'm glad I don't use them and they need serious oversight. Just today Twitter allowed the promotion of genocide on what they would consider to be their tightly moderated platform https://twitter.com/chineseembinus/status/1347247602094534658 https://twitter.com/chineseembinus/status/134724760209453465...

Rebelgecko 6y ago

If you follow the links, the "64%" statistic is from data that is at least 5 years old. Are there more recent #s? A lot has changed in the last 5 years. I'd also argue that "Facebook: We told them to join these groups" is a misleading take, since it's not a quote from Facebook and it's twisting their words. I guess "64% of Facebook users joined groups via recommendations" isn't sexy enough of a headline. It's interesting that no one mentions the percentage for non-extremist groups. Assuming the omission is intentional, I wouldn't be surprised if the rate for rate for extremist groups is actually lower than for nonextremist groups

dang 6y ago

Editorializing titles like this is against the site guidelines and will cause you to lose submission privileges on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html In this case it's tricky because the article's own title is baity, so the HN guidelines call for changing it: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait". But they add "don't editorialize". Cherry-picking a detail out of the article and making it the title is the leading form of editorializing. When an original title is baity or misleading, the way to rewrite it is to find representative language from somewhere else in the article—something that accurately and neutrally represents what it is about. There's nearly always something there that's suitable: it might be in the HTML doc title, the URL, a subheading, the first paragraph...sometimes even a photo caption. Separately from the title, this article is an op-ed that doesn't add any significant information and is therefore not a good HN submission, especially not on a topic du jour like this one, which is generating hundreds of different articles.

hunter2_ 6y ago
I like these rules, and you do great work keeping things on track. This scenario got me thinking, though: what if all but one thing in an article falls into the "doesn't add any significant information and is therefore not a good HN submission" bucket? Is it better to move on without discussing it here because we only discuss complete works, or is there a mechanism to have this community discuss just one particular fact that unfortunately doesn't have a URL dedicated to it? Actually, it would have a URL dedicated to it if the submitter used a `#:~:text=` fragment.
- pvg 6y ago
  The standard mechanism you'll find in the dangworks is you submit the thing and write a (almost certainly first) comment about that one interesting thing. You get to steer the discussion somewhat but not frame it entirely.
- throwaway201103 6y ago
  I would say, submit the article with a neturalized title, then post a comment highlighting the interesting fact to start the discussion. Edit: sorry pvg, your comment wasn't there when I started to post mine.

refurb 6y ago

Anyone have an unbiased, objective definition of extremist group? I mean, if I join PETA, does that count? Or Black Israelites Facebook page?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ashleshbiradar 6y ago

again, we should focus more on education than moderation.