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"In 2017, Chris Cox, Facebook’s longtime chief product officer, formed a new task force to understand whether maximizing user engagement on Facebook was contrib
by contemporary343 6y ago
"In 2017, Chris Cox, Facebook’s longtime chief product officer, formed a new task force to understand whether maximizing user engagement on Facebook was contributing to political polarization. It found that there was indeed a correlation, and that reducing polarization would mean taking a hit on engagement. In a mid-2018 document reviewed by the Journal, the task force proposed several potential fixes, such as tweaking the recommendation algorithms to suggest a more diverse range of groups for people to join. But it acknowledged that some of the ideas were “antigrowth.” Most of the proposals didn’t move forward, and the task force disbanded.
Since then, other employees have corroborated these findings. A former Facebook AI researcher who joined in 2018 says he and his team conducted “study after study” confirming the same basic idea: models that maximize engagement increase polarization. They could easily track how strongly users agreed or disagreed on different issues, what content they liked to engage with, and how their stances changed as a result. Regardless of the issue, the models learned to feed users increasingly extreme viewpoints. “Over time they measurably become more polarized,” he says."
Facebook has repeatedly shown that it will maximize its bottom line and growth (in particular, as measured by engagement metrics) above everything else. Fair enough, they're a for-profit corporation! I just can't really take seriously their claims of 'self-regulation'. They simply can never be trusted to self-regulate because it's just not in their interest, and they've never shown meaningful actions in this regard. They will only respond to the legal stick - and it is most certainly coming.
- contemporary343 6y agoAnother key quote that explains the fundamental misalignment of incentives at the employee level - you're rewarded for increasing engagment metrics. So why do something that might decrease it? "But anything that reduced engagement, even for reasons such as not exacerbating someone’s depression, led to a lot of hemming and hawing among leadership. With their performance reviews and salaries tied to the successful completion of projects, employees quickly learned to drop those that received pushback and continue working on those dictated from the top down."
- cosmodisk 6y agoIt's funny how probably less than 50 people in one private company can have such a great impact on hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
- eplanit 6y agoVery interesting. The parallels with FB (et al.) and tobacco company history is remarkable.
- 908B64B197 6y agoSomeone will have to explain to me how is that any different than a tabloid, or even a legacy newspaper/news broadcast. The more shocking it is, the more eyeballs it attracts and the more add revenue it gets.
- athenot 6y agoTabloids come at most daily. They don't create patterns of continuous engagement throughout the day (unless linked to by social media). News broadcast is a better analogy but still not as addictive as something that continually reaches out to you throughout the day.
- Barracoon 6y agoI'd add the active component of Facebook compared to tabloids/broadcasts. With the latter, I'm just a consumer. With the former, I'm actively contributing via share/like/comment. There's probably a psychological component that deepens your commitment to the viewpoint when you actively participate like that.
- coffeefirst 6y agoThey also aren't personalized, which has more side effects than people realize. Even the most nihilist shock-jock has to pick a speed that won't alienate half his audience or drive all the advertisers away from the network. In these systems, those counterweights don't exist.
- strangeloops85 6y agoTwo main differences: Scale and transparency. The scale of reach is tremendous, faster and optimized in a way newspapers/media could only dream of. It's also not publicly clear what is being widely disseminated and to whom, other than when outside parties analyze what's happening within Facebook on a given day (and this has limits).
- throwaway53453 6y agoTabloids has the same issue with transparency and scale. The media industry took a liking to pushing governments to war, whereas so far Facebook has proven to just hunger for money.
- synaesthesisx 6y agoThis is spot on. Advertising companies like Facebook, self-optimize for one thing only: user engagement/impressions.
- rapind 6y agoThe self regulation argument is ALWAYS bullshit. If a company loses business by self regulating then a competitor may come a long and eat their lunch. We shouldn’t expect it, and shouldn’t be disappointed when it doesn’t happen. This is what the public (government) should be responsible for. That way regulation is uniform (at least one can hope) across the industry.
- tim333 6y ago>They will only respond to the legal stick - and it is most certainly coming But how are you going to legislate the engagement / polarisation tradeoff?