Facebook Doing Its Thing with Weaponized Content?
October 1, 2021
I read “Facebook Forced Troll Farm Content on Over 40% of All Americans Each Month.” Straight away, I have problems with “all.” The reality is that “all” Americans means those who don’t use Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp. Hence, I am not sure how accurate the story itself is.
Let’s take a look at a couple of snippets, shall we?
Here’s one that caught my attention:
When the report was published in 2019, troll farms were reaching 100 million Americans and 360 million people worldwide every week. In any given month, Facebook was showing troll farm posts to 140 million Americans. Most of the users never followed any of the pages. Rather, Facebook’s content-recommendation algorithms had forced the content on over 100 million Americans weekly. “A big majority of their ability to reach our users comes from the structure of our platform and our ranking algorithms rather than user choice,” the report said. Sweeping internal Facebook memo: “I have blood on my hands” The troll farms appeared to single out users in the US. While globally more people saw the content by raw numbers—360 million every week by Facebook’s own accounting—troll farms were reaching over 40 percent of all Americans.
Yeah, lots of numbers, not much context, and the source of the data appears to be Facebook. Maybe on the money, maybe a bent penny? If we assume that the passage is “sort of correct”, Facebook has added to its track record for content moderation.
Here’s another snippet I circled in red:
Allen believed the problem could be fixed relatively easily by incorporating “Graph Authority,” a way to rank users and pages similar to Google’s PageRank, into the News Feed algorithm. “Adding even just some easy features like Graph Authority and pulling the dial back from pure engagement-based features would likely pay off a ton in both the integrity space and… likely in engagement as well,” he wrote. Allen [a former data scientist at Facebook,] left Facebook shortly after writing the document, MIT Technology Review reports, in part because the company “effectively ignored” his research, a source said.
Disgruntled employee? Fancy dancing with confidential information? A couple of verification items?
Net net: On the surface, Facebook continues to do what its senior management prioritizes. Without informed oversight, what’s the downside for Facebook? Answer: At this time, none.
Stephen E Arnold, October 1, 2021
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