The stream of unsettling stories about Facebook based on internal documents obtained by news organizations continues its steady flow. As I mentioned in Tuesday’s newsletter, there’s just so much that it’s hard to know where to start and there is a concern that the impact will be lost just by the sheer volume of it all.
Then comes a story such as the one by Jeremy B. Merrill and Will Oremus of The Washington Post. It produced what I think is the most jolting and infuriating paragraph I’ve read so far in the dozens of articles based on The Facebook Papers.
Five years ago, Facebook gave users different ways to react to something posted on its site. You’re familiar with them — things such as the classic thumbs-up “like,” as well as “love,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad” and “angry.”
Now for the jaw-dropping paragraph from The Post:
Behind the scenes, Facebook programmed the algorithm that decides what people see in their news feeds to use the reaction emoji as signals to push more emotional and provocative content — including content likely to make them angry. Starting in 2017, Facebook’s ranking algorithm treated emoji reactions as five times more valuable than “likes,” internal documents reveal. The theory was simple: Posts that prompted lots of reaction emoji tended to keep users more engaged, and keeping users engaged was the key to Facebook’s business.
Internal documents showed that some within Facebook realized the hornet’s nest that could be whacked. One staffer said that favoring these controversial posts could open “the door to more spam/abuse/clickbait inadvertently.” A colleague responded, “It’s possible.”
The Post wrote, “The warning proved prescient. The company’s data scientists confirmed in 2019 that posts that sparked angry reaction emoji were disproportionately likely to include misinformation, toxicity and low-quality news. That means Facebook for three years systematically amped up some of the worst of its platform, making it more prominent in users’ feeds and spreading it to a much wider audience.”
That’s horrific.
It’s the backbone of the reason former Facebook employee Frances Haugen blew the whistle. Haugen testified before British lawmakers this week that, “Anger and hate is the easiest way to grow on Facebook.” She went on to say, “Bad actors have an incentive to play the algorithm. The current system is biased towards bad actors, and people who push people to the extremes.”
Oremus, one of the reporters on Post story, tweeted Tuesday, “To me this is not a story of Facebook intentionally fanning anger for profit. It's a story of how arbitrary initial decisions, set by humans for business reasons, become reified as the status quo, even as evidence mounts that they're fueling harms.”
He added, “The initial choice to weight reaction emojis as 5x likes was aggressive, but not indefensible: They signaled greater engagement. Yet that arbitrary choice became part of the firmament; the burden shifted to integrity staff to prove it could be changed without denting engagement. Anger isn't bad *per se.* When attached to real harm, it can deter bad behavior, drive change. But anger also isn't good *per se.* When systemically incentivized on a network that lacks publication controls or fact checks, it rewards misinfo, hate, & rage-bait.”
(Disclosure: Facebook is a funder of Poynter, PolitiFact and related work, though has no editorial involvement.)
More Facebook …
Alex Kantrowitz writes Big Technology, a newsletter about Big Tech and society. He’s part of the consortium of news organizations who are looking at The Facebook Papers. But writing for Nieman Lab, Kantrowitz said it’s time to dissolve the consortium.
He writes, “The Facebook documents that Haugen’s handed over to us — thousands upon thousands, with information about crucial aspects of Facebook’s decision-making — are simply too important to the public interest to keep under wraps. Right now, they’re available to us in a Google Drive, organized fairly neatly, and we are able to download them. But instead of a consortium of reporters sorting through them and writing stories based on what we see, we should expand our efforts to focus on the responsible redaction and wide release of these documents.”
Kantrowitz acknowledges that releasing the documents would be challenging, mostly because they are poorly redacted and could cause privacy and safety issues.
He offers a couple of suggestions on how to release the papers and then writes, “I don’t have all the answers. But what I do have is a view into a trove of documents that I’m sure belong in the public’s hands. The more broadly available we can make them, the closer we can get to solving the problems they uncover. It’s time for us to figure out a way to get these documents out.”
Speaking of the consortium, check out The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi with “The massive Facebook leak shows how investigative journalism is changing.”
One more Facebook story for today …
Also worth your attention, The New York Times’ Cecilia Kang with “Facebook Faces a Public Relations Crisis. What About a Legal One?”
Big hire for Baltimore startup
Stewart Bainum isn’t messing around. After the Maryland hotel magnate’s plans to buy The Baltimore Sun from Tribune Publishing fell through, Bainum decided to start his own nonprofit digital news outlet called The Baltimore Banner.
He already announced plans to invest $15 million annually and hire 50 journalists. On Tuesday, he continued to show how committed he is by hiring a respected journalism veteran to run it. The Washington Post’s Sarah Ellison writes that Bainum has hired Kimi Yoshino, a managing editor at the Los Angeles Times.
Yoshino, a California native who spent 21 years at the Times, told Ellison that it took something special for her to leave the “two places” she loves. She leaves the Times, which is in better condition under owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong.
She told Ellison, “I’ve lived through — and survived — bad newspaper ownership and a bad boss. The L.A. Times still has work to do on its path toward sustainability, but it’s absolutely headed in the right direction … I can’t think of a more important challenge right now than figuring out a way to make local journalism sustainable.”
Bainum, again, insists that he is not competing against the Sun, but supplementing its coverage. He praised the Sun, telling Ellison, “Those reporters have their hands tied behind their back and they’re still doing a good job. There’s a lot of damn talent there. And we just want to add to it.”
NBC News to stream election coverage
