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Every reply so far has missed the point of this sentence, so here it is: Facebook reporting accurately is sane, but Facebook is in charge of what is being repo

Every reply so far has missed the point of this sentence, so here it is: Facebook reporting accurately is sane, but Facebook is in charge of what is being reported, which is not sane. Like, imagine if your friend was slowly poisoning himself by flavoring his food with lead for a month. Even if he is honest with you about what he’s been doing, it’s still not a sane situation. If anything it’s less sane to be seemingly lucid and forthright about a month of self-destructive behavior, but not actually do anything to change it. The question here is: why did Facebook allow the situation to get so bad that this page was the top for a whole month? Why didn’t someone at Facebook notice this stupid pointless scam page was surging and do even a little of research and tweaking to change that? They have seemingly abandoning any responsibility for the behavior of the machine they built and operate. Personally I don’t give them many points for just reporting that.

klyrs 5y ago
It's more complicated than that. Facebook is a company. People in different parts of the company do different things, have different motivations, etc. One cannot look at a large organization as an individual. I tried to come up with a more apt analogy... but analogies are awful here.
- cj 5y ago
  If it were a tiny thing that slipped under the radar, I'd buy it, but if my company were being dinged in the media every day for spreading misinformation, I would make sure the whole company is hyperaware of how misinformation spreads... which is often through viral posts and pages. I don't think this sort of oversight is something to blame on corporate bureaucracy.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    maybe these junk posts are all that’s left to boost after tamping down the obvious misinformation and political propaganda
- rob74 5y ago
  So, probably lots of people actually did notice it, and either (a) shrugged and thought "not my job", or (b) notified someone else about it, who then did (a)?
  - brendoelfrendo 5y ago
    There's also likely a (c), which is people who don't think that Facebook should do anything about it. I guess that could be considered part of a set with (a), but I thought it should be mentioned separately as it's a different motivation.
    - kreeben 5y ago
      Might I suggest (d): analysts, disgusted by the fact this crap is on top, tweaked The Feed in an attempt to disfavor that type of content then ran a simulation but saw their simulated ad revenue become lower than allowed minimum, then did (a) and went out to have lunch.
    - fragmede 5y ago
      “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair In particular, stare too hard at that viral page, realize how scummy that page is, and then spend the rest of a career at facebook trying to tear down the systems that made that the most viral page, are likely going to earn you enemies, and cause the company to lose money (in the short term, at least).
      - IncRnd 5y ago
        Did you stare at that page on Facebook? The top post has millions of comments.
  - xmprt 5y ago
    Which is totally fair in my opinion. It is no single individual's job to fix an issue this big and I don't think it's even feasible for a single person to do at a company like this. And if management hasn't set up incentives for people to proactively fix issues like this then they probably won't get fixed. Upper management can and should fix these issues but they probably don't care because they don't think it's an issue.
thinkloop 5y ago
It doesn't seem like facebook pumped the whole page, all other posts have extremely low engagement, literally < 10 likes. What's wrong with pumping individual "good" posts? If anything it can be seen as honorable/egalitarian giving folks a chance to make it even if they aren't some media behemoth.
- jonas21 5y ago
  This is the central tragedy of Facebook. They set out to build a platform where anyone, no matter how small, could compete with big media on a level playing field based on a straightforward metric: whether a user cares enough about a post that they're willing to engage with it. Publishers get rewarded for producing compelling content, users get to see more content they care about, and Facebook makes money since people spend more time on the site. Everybody wins. And they succeeded wildly at this. But as it turns out, the things people respond to most are spam and hate and conspiracy theories.
  - BLKNSLVR 5y ago
    I'm really not sure if that was ever what Facebook set out to do. My mental construct of Facebook is analogous to Morty following the path defined by the death crystal but towards the end goal of 'the most money'.
    - krolden 5y ago
      Collect data
      - netizen-936824 5y ago
        And collecting data leads to what in this day and age? Collecting money.
    - Igelau 5y ago
      Mine is Universal Paperclips, except it makes engagement statistics instead of paperclips.
MrAwesome 5y ago
Ex-FB here. My guess is that it's primarily a combination of two factors: 1) Someone / some org was slow to notice that this was happening. 2) Bureaucratic muck slowed resolution down. Even once escalated, there would be a lot of red tape to go through to make the necessary changes to how things are ranked. The people noticing the problem most likely aren't the people able to make changes, the changes would need to be tested at scale and their effects evaluated, and the people making the changes would have a lot of deliberating, politicking, explaining, and appeasing to do. Add onto that that everyone is stressed out of their minds, worried about performance reviews, and having to balance changes they want to make against how they and everyone else are evaluated at perf time...
- addingnumbers 5y ago
  > Even once escalated, there would be a lot of red tape to go through to make the necessary changes to how things are ranked. When I write a program that accidentally gradually fills a disk with garbage, I don't wait until I can redesign the program before I delete the garbage.
  - netizen-936824 5y ago
    Yea, but does the garbage earn you money on ad views?
- MauranKilom 5y ago
  Ok, but all that must also be true for the change that originally created this situation. There's all this red tape and large-scale testing and then... nobody actually looks at what hits the #1 spot?
  - space_fountain 5y ago
    Remember spam is an adversarial relationship. Almost certainly when whatever ranking change was exploited here was deployed the top ranked items were great, then some actor started realizing what was being selected for and exploited it
Igelau 5y ago
You just don't understand the Metav3rse.
worace 5y ago
I enjoy this author's podcasts and newsletters, and an interesting angle they've covered recently is that Facebook, ostensibly trying to "clean up their act" with regard to being seen as a platform for disinformation and radicalization, has been tweaking their algorithm to not promote so much alt-right and similar content. But the problem is, once they exclude all that stuff, there's just not a lot left. So you end up with inane garbage like this account being the most popular content on the platform. Like the whole platform is just Ben Shapiro and drop-shipping scammers. Really paints an "emperor has no clothes" picture of what's going on on Facebook these days.

klyrs 5y ago

It's more complicated than that. Facebook is a company. People in different parts of the company do different things, have different motivations, etc. One cannot look at a large organization as an individual. I tried to come up with a more apt analogy... but analogies are awful here.

cj 5y ago
If it were a tiny thing that slipped under the radar, I'd buy it, but if my company were being dinged in the media every day for spreading misinformation, I would make sure the whole company is hyperaware of how misinformation spreads... which is often through viral posts and pages. I don't think this sort of oversight is something to blame on corporate bureaucracy.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  maybe these junk posts are all that’s left to boost after tamping down the obvious misinformation and political propaganda
rob74 5y ago
So, probably lots of people actually did notice it, and either (a) shrugged and thought "not my job", or (b) notified someone else about it, who then did (a)?
- brendoelfrendo 5y ago
  There's also likely a (c), which is people who don't think that Facebook should do anything about it. I guess that could be considered part of a set with (a), but I thought it should be mentioned separately as it's a different motivation.
  - kreeben 5y ago
    Might I suggest (d): analysts, disgusted by the fact this crap is on top, tweaked The Feed in an attempt to disfavor that type of content then ran a simulation but saw their simulated ad revenue become lower than allowed minimum, then did (a) and went out to have lunch.
  - fragmede 5y ago
    “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair In particular, stare too hard at that viral page, realize how scummy that page is, and then spend the rest of a career at facebook trying to tear down the systems that made that the most viral page, are likely going to earn you enemies, and cause the company to lose money (in the short term, at least).
    - IncRnd 5y ago
      Did you stare at that page on Facebook? The top post has millions of comments.
- xmprt 5y ago
  Which is totally fair in my opinion. It is no single individual's job to fix an issue this big and I don't think it's even feasible for a single person to do at a company like this. And if management hasn't set up incentives for people to proactively fix issues like this then they probably won't get fixed. Upper management can and should fix these issues but they probably don't care because they don't think it's an issue.

thinkloop 5y ago

It doesn't seem like facebook pumped the whole page, all other posts have extremely low engagement, literally < 10 likes. What's wrong with pumping individual "good" posts? If anything it can be seen as honorable/egalitarian giving folks a chance to make it even if they aren't some media behemoth.

jonas21 5y ago
This is the central tragedy of Facebook. They set out to build a platform where anyone, no matter how small, could compete with big media on a level playing field based on a straightforward metric: whether a user cares enough about a post that they're willing to engage with it. Publishers get rewarded for producing compelling content, users get to see more content they care about, and Facebook makes money since people spend more time on the site. Everybody wins. And they succeeded wildly at this. But as it turns out, the things people respond to most are spam and hate and conspiracy theories.
- BLKNSLVR 5y ago
  I'm really not sure if that was ever what Facebook set out to do. My mental construct of Facebook is analogous to Morty following the path defined by the death crystal but towards the end goal of 'the most money'.
  - krolden 5y ago
    Collect data
    - netizen-936824 5y ago
      And collecting data leads to what in this day and age? Collecting money.
  - Igelau 5y ago
    Mine is Universal Paperclips, except it makes engagement statistics instead of paperclips.

MrAwesome 5y ago

Ex-FB here. My guess is that it's primarily a combination of two factors: 1) Someone / some org was slow to notice that this was happening. 2) Bureaucratic muck slowed resolution down. Even once escalated, there would be a lot of red tape to go through to make the necessary changes to how things are ranked. The people noticing the problem most likely aren't the people able to make changes, the changes would need to be tested at scale and their effects evaluated, and the people making the changes would have a lot of deliberating, politicking, explaining, and appeasing to do. Add onto that that everyone is stressed out of their minds, worried about performance reviews, and having to balance changes they want to make against how they and everyone else are evaluated at perf time...

addingnumbers 5y ago
> Even once escalated, there would be a lot of red tape to go through to make the necessary changes to how things are ranked. When I write a program that accidentally gradually fills a disk with garbage, I don't wait until I can redesign the program before I delete the garbage.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  Yea, but does the garbage earn you money on ad views?
MauranKilom 5y ago
Ok, but all that must also be true for the change that originally created this situation. There's all this red tape and large-scale testing and then... nobody actually looks at what hits the #1 spot?
- space_fountain 5y ago
  Remember spam is an adversarial relationship. Almost certainly when whatever ranking change was exploited here was deployed the top ranked items were great, then some actor started realizing what was being selected for and exploited it

Igelau 5y ago

You just don't understand the Metav3rse.

worace 5y ago

I enjoy this author's podcasts and newsletters, and an interesting angle they've covered recently is that Facebook, ostensibly trying to "clean up their act" with regard to being seen as a platform for disinformation and radicalization, has been tweaking their algorithm to not promote so much alt-right and similar content. But the problem is, once they exclude all that stuff, there's just not a lot left. So you end up with inane garbage like this account being the most popular content on the platform. Like the whole platform is just Ben Shapiro and drop-shipping scammers. Really paints an "emperor has no clothes" picture of what's going on on Facebook these days.