>The platform strongly rewarded controversy because no kind of engagement was considered negative. Good article on this topic from 2021: >Five points for ange

>The platform strongly rewarded controversy because no kind of engagement was considered negative. Good article on this topic from 2021: >Five points for anger, one for a ‘like’: How Facebook’s formula fostered rage and misinformation https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/26/facebook-angry-emoji-algorithm/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/26/faceboo... >The first downgrade to the angry emoji weighting came in 2018, when Facebook cut it to four times the value of a like, keeping the same weight for all of the emotions. >But it was apparent that not all emotional reactions were the same. Anger was the least used of the six emoji reactions, at 429 million clicks per week, compared with 63 billion likes and 11 billion “love” reactions, according to a 2020 document. Facebook’s data scientists found that angry reactions were “much more frequent” on problematic posts: “civic low quality news, civic misinfo, civic toxicity, health misinfo, and health antivax content,” according to a document from 2019. Its research that year showed the angry reaction was “being weaponized” by political figures. >In April 2019, Facebook put in place a mechanism to “demote” content that was receiving disproportionately angry reactions, although the documents don’t make clear how or where that was used, or what its effects were.