For a few years now, Facebook has been concerned that people use its platform less. That is why in 2018 it made important changes to its algorithm. They wanted to promote the posts with the highest engagement to generate “meaningful social interactions,” or MSI, a metric they use to measure the degree of consumption. And it worked – people viewed their contacts’ content more often and found it trustworthy. But the change was accompanied by adverse side effects: it prioritized violent, toxic, false and politically divisive content.
And his employees have long known that a tweak to the algorithm could heighten political division and outrage.
A change in the algorithm. All the commotion arises as a result of an investigation by The Wall Street Journal that details the reasons why Facebook modified the algorithm and how they hid its consequences. Basically a hidden system was developed to rate the posts and promote them. A “like” equaled one point, while reactions, including angry emojis that popped up on controversial topics, accounted for five points.
One way to explain how BuzzFeed posts like “21 Things Almost All White People Are Guilty of Saying” had 16,000 comments while others on personal care and animals had a hard time breaking through. Thus, hundreds of organizations and media began to viralize content on Facebook and other social networks easily.
Side effects. The company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, said at the time that the goal of the change was to strengthen ties between users and improve their well-being. Facebook would encourage people to interact more with friends and family and spend less time passively consuming professionally produced content (newspapers), which they claimed was detrimental to their mental health. However, within the company, employees warned that the change was having the opposite effect, according to TWSJ reports.
It was making the Facebook platform a more aggressive place. And so publishers and political parties were reorienting their posts toward outrage and sensationalism. And with it they were more successful in their publications. Some political parties in Europe warned the platform that the algorithm had made them change their political positions so that they would have more resonance.
And they knew it. In an interview, Lars Backstrom, Facebook’s vice president of engineering, said that any algorithm runs the risk of promoting content that is objectionable or harmful to some users. “Like any optimization, there will be some ways to exploit it or take advantage of it,” he said. The data scientists on that integrity team, whose job it is to improve the quality and reliability of content, worked on a series of modifications to curb the tendency of the revised algorithm to reward outrage and lies.
But Zuckerberg resisted some of the proposed fixes, the documents show, because he was concerned they could harm the company’s other goal: to get users more engaged with Facebook. One of those changes would have removed the drive to spread more content likely to be shared. “Zuckerberg said he was willing to test the approach but we would not launch if there was a material trade-off with the impact of MSI,” the team explained.
We have seen it in Spain. The Facebook researchers detailed in their report that in Spain, political parties execute sophisticated operations to make their publications on the platform travel as far and fast as possible. “They have learned that harsh attacks on their opponents generate the most engagement. They claim they ‘try not to’ but ultimately, ‘you use what works.’
In the 15 months after the 2017 clashes over Catalan separatism, the percentage of insults and threats on public Facebook pages related to social and political debate in Spain increased by 43%, according to research conducted by Constella Intelligence, a Spanish agency for the protection of digital risks.
And in the Vox machinery. We found a good summary of what was happening in our country at that time in this report by El Confidencial. He talked about how Santiago Abascal’s party strategy copied Trump’s campaigns: the best way to reach potential voters is by outraging and annoying his rivals. One way of saying that his technique was profitable in pissing off the left, thereby ensuring that his messages reach those who are outraged and reacted.
📌Vox is currently paying for the dissemination of 9 videos or posts that are reaching the audiences that they have segmented. Some deal with very current news such as the Strasbourg attacks. https://t.co/KzCdqOgP7T pic.twitter.com/Vx5HjFSo3X
– Carmela Ríos (@CarmelaRios) December 14, 2018
Vox is one of the parties that has used paid micro-segmented campaigns on Facebook as a promotional weapon. As explained in that article, they use some of the posts published on their wall and inject money into them to distribute them in the form of advertising among very specific groups of users. Vox not only paid for its content to reach its potential voters, but also those that the algorithm of the social network identifies as left-wing.
Although Vox theoretically spent less than Podemos or PP on advertising, it ended up reaching more people. It also served to explain why a post about the Valley of the Fallen, Franco or Primo de Rivera barely generates 5% of interactions. However, an ad ‘spanking’ Ada Colau, Pablo Iglesias, ‘the communists’ shoots up to 23%. A plan to manufacture conflict and easily go viral on the Internet.