Facebook was still terrible before it became a cesspool of boomer right wing Memes. Somehow, I can’t find a single take of yours that I agree with
FFS it is not censorship, it is a private platform that needs to be regulated as a media company. We need truth brought back as a requirement for news channels or they are libel. DD
“Internal Facebook documents give insight into the company’s practices, according to reports The Facebook Papers is a collaborative reporting effort from 17 American news outlets that worked together to gain access to thousands of pages of internal company documents obtained by Frances Haugen, the former Facebook product manager who is now known as the company’s whistleblower. The news outlets started to release their respective reporting on Monday, providing a rare glimpse into the company's practices and a closer look at a wide range of issues, including its fading popularity with teens, how its platforms might harm children, its ability to counter hate speech, its treatment of politicians and its alleged role in inciting political violence. Facebook released a statement last week in response to the upcoming reporting that read, in part: "A curated selection out of millions of documents at Facebook can in no way be used to draw fair conclusions about us."”
One of Facebook’s Integrity staffers wrote at length about this dynamic in a goodbye note to colleagues in August 2020, describing how risks to Facebook users “fester” because of the “asymmetrical” burden placed on employees to “demonstrate legitimacy and user value” before launching any harm-mitigation tactics—a burden not shared by those developing new features or algorithm changes with growth and engagement in mind. The note said: "We were willing to act only after things had spiraled into a dire state … Personally, during the time that we hesitated, I’ve seen folks from my hometown go further and further down the rabbithole of QAnon and Covid anti-mask/anti-vax conspiracy on FB. It has been painful to observe." Current and former Facebook employees describe the same fundamentally broken culture—one in which effective tactics for making Facebook safer are rolled back by leadership or never approved in the first place. (A Facebook spokesperson rejected the notion that it deprioritizes the well-being of its users.) That broken culture has produced a broken platform: an algorithmic ecosystem in which users are pushed toward ever more extreme content, and where Facebook knowingly exposes its users to conspiracy theories, disinformation, and incitement to violence.
One example is a program that amounts to a whitelist for VIPs on Facebook, allowing some of the users most likely to spread misinformation to break Facebook’s rules without facing consequences. Under the program, internal documents show, millions of high-profile users—including politicians—are left alone by Facebook even when they incite violence. Some employees have flagged for their superiors how dangerous this is, explaining in one internal document that Facebook had solid evidence showing that when “a piece of content is shared by a co-partisan politician, it tends to be perceived as more trustworthy, interesting, and helpful than if it’s shared by an ordinary citizen.” In other words, whitelisting influential users with massive followings on Facebook isn’t just a secret and uneven application of Facebook’s rules; it amounts to “protecting content that is especially likely to deceive, and hence to harm, people on our platforms.”
“We can’t pretend we don’t see information consumption patterns, and how deeply problematic they are for the longevity of democratic discourse,” a user-experience researcher wrote in an internal comment thread in 2019, in response to a now-infamous memo from Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, a longtime Facebook executive. “There is no neutral position at this stage, it would be powerfully immoral to commit to amorality.”
You guys need to watch the documentary "The Social Dilemna" and you will get the full breadth of the issue. FB is terrible for society, it was fine - pre funneling of people into smaller groups. DD
