Facebook rewards engagement. And it's ripping us apart.
The echo chamber is real and not at all spectacular.
We are just a week from Election Day, a misnomer in this weird year, as there have already been 64 million votes cast.
And starting today, Facebook’s policy of pausing all campaign-related ads kicks in. But does that really matter? Lol no.
Facebook political ad spend, as Sheryl Sandberg said months ago, is a “very small part of our revenue.” How small? Less than 1 percent of its revenue.
But money isn’t the only consideration here.
Researchers, writing in the Washington Post about their peer-reviewed research, found that the algorithms of social platforms have an outsize influence on what people read. The conclusion: content surfaced via algorithms “shape the news and information that users consume.”
And platforms like Facebook and Reddit, they say,
shape the news consumption of their conservative users in dramatically different ways. In months when a typical conservative visited Facebook more than usual, they read news that was about 30 percent more conservative than the online news they usually read. In contrast, during months when a typical conservative used Reddit more than usual, they read news that was far less conservative — about 50 percent more moderate than what they typically read.
In other words, agenda setting in the digital age is a black box of decision making informed by both humans and machines. Algorithms reward the behaviors of people, and people, we know,
From the authors of the research:
Reddit prioritizes content based on what users vote to be the most interesting or informative, but Facebook gives priority to what has garnered the most engagement, which can span from positive affirmation to angry disagreement. This can lead to the most intensely passionate, most partisan Facebook users drowning out moderate voices.
Reddit’s co-founder, Alexis Ohanian:
This is further evident when looking at how Facebook values content from the Right versus the Left. In today’s Washington Post, Margaret Sullivan talks to progressive outlets, such as Courier Newsroom and Mother Jones, which argue persuasively that Facebook buried their content in its News Feed because unlike right-wing media, they don’t have Mark Zuckerberg’s ear.
Lindsay Schrupp, the Courier’s editor, spoke with Sullivan:
Schrupp strongly objects to what she calls “the outrageous false equivalency” that depicts Courier as the left-leaning counterpart of the burgeoning right-wing “pay-to-play” media sites that have cropped up as local newspapers have withered. “It’s infuriating,” she told me. “Our intent isn’t to spread misinformation, and we have clearly articulated journalistic standards and ethics.”
But, she complains, in making its decisions, Facebook doesn’t consider that. It only looks at the politics of Courier’s backers.
And this comes on the heels of Mother Jones’ look at how Facebook essentially crippled the outlet.
What wasn’t publicly known until now is that Facebook actually ran experiments to see how the changes would affect publishers—and when it found that some of them would have a dramatic impact on the reach of right-wing “junk sites,” as a former employee with knowledge of the conversations puts it, the engineers were sent back to lessen those impacts. As the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, they came back in January 2018 with a second iteration that dialed up the harm to progressive-leaning news organizations instead.
In fact, we have now learned that executives were even shown a slide presentation that highlighted the impact of the second iteration on about a dozen specific publishers—and Mother Jones was singled out as one that would suffer, while the conservative site the Daily Wire was identified as one that would benefit. These changes were pushed by Republican operatives working in Facebook’s Washington office under Vice President of Global Public Policy Joel Kaplan (who later made headlines for demonstratively supporting his friend Brett Kavanaugh during confirmation hearings).
Facebook denies this, telling Mother Jones:
We did not make changes with the intent of impacting individual publishers. We only made updates after they were reviewed by many different teams across many disciplines to ensure the rationale was clear and consistent and could be explained to all publishers.
Over at The Margins newsletter, Ranjan Roy echoes what researchers point to:
From the day they went algorithmic, Facebook started throttling the un-engaging. The boring among became voiceless. Tempered viewpoints are shut down. The mundane moments of life are no longer worth sharing. That off-center photo, not-quite-in-focus photo of your kids had every right to show up in your friends' feeds as the latest post from Dan Bongino, but it won’t.
In a way, we all kind of know this, right?
In 2014, Zuckerberg told Wired
“We’re testing a lot of things every day to figure out what’s going to make the most engaging feed. We use quantitative metrics that measure likes and comments and clicks and shares and other activities to see if a story is good, but we also have qualitative systems so that people can reorder a feed to tell us what they thought were the most important things.”
And what triggered this “test”? Zuck saw that a staffer’s birthday post was ranking higher than his niece’s birth because when people write “congratulations” in the comments, the post got a boost. This was the root of Facebook’s News Feed: use words that push the algorithm to surface stories connecting users—in the pre-2016 days, it was about big life events like graduation, a new job, new baby, etc that the algorithm rewarded.
But as the last five or six years show, the algorithm rewarded any content that got the most engagement, not just the mundane life stuff. That mundane, boring stuff got throttled. And what gets the most engagement? Fantastical posts about conspiracy theories, often peddled by accounts with large followings.
This is why banning political ad spend makes little sense, by the way. If a bad-faith actor has tens of thousands or millions of followers, a post can spread without putting some paid juice behind it.
But let’s take a step back.
Advertisers: If you say that you support journalism—and you do on multiple levels, from sponsorships to ads—at what point do you place your support of journalism over the efficacy of the platforms to help you make money? In other words, if you now know that Facebook is tilting the scale away from particular publishers based on political leanings, do you have a responsibility to not support, through advertising or use, the platform that is most effectively crippling the news industry? Would the money that you give Facebook better serve your community by going directly to a publisher?
At some point, these will stop becoming rhetorical questions. Especially if the Senate asks Zuckerberg about allegations of censorship at tomorrow’s hearing.
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Muse, “Algorithm”
Quick housekeeping note:
With November just a couple days away, and now that it’s becoming painfully clear I will not find a job for quite a long time, I will be looking into turning this into a paid newsletter, through both subscriptions and advertising over the coming weeks. More TK on that, but after six months of unemployment and no luck even getting job interviews, my hand is forced. You know, bills to pay, mouths to feed, etc. I enjoy writing this dinky newsletter, and I’m so grateful you all are here. Hopefully you’ll stay; I think I can set it up so that even if you don’t pay, you can get a free version. Anyway, as always, thank you!
Some interesting links:
For comedians on Netflix:
Sarah Cooper’s Netflix special is an October surprise—for Trump (Fast Company)
For TV in COVID:
How ‘This Is Us’ season 5 adapted to COVID, Black Lives Matter (L.A. Times)
For rip-chords:
Guitar Center prepares for possible bankruptcy (NYT)
For political ad spend:
Bloomberg funds last minute advertising blitz for Biden in Texas (NYT)
For smart rebuttal to Media Nut:
In defense of the presidential newspaper endorsement (CJR)
For publishers:
BuzzFeed expects to break even this year, thanks to heavy cut costs (WSJ)
For media criticism:
Ruth Shalit just wrote for The Atlantic. Would readers know it from the byline? (WaPo)
The Today Show owes Joe Biden an apology (Press Run)
For building new media companies:
The Lincoln Project is becoming a media business (Axios)