The trade-offs came into focus this month, when Facebook engineers and data scientists posted the results of a series of experiments called “P(Bad for the World).”
The company had surveyed users about whether certain posts they had seen were “good for the world” or “bad for the world.” They found that high-reach posts — posts seen by many users — were more likely to be considered “bad for the world,” a finding that some employees said alarmed them.
So the team trained a machine-learning algorithm to predict posts that users would consider “bad for the world” and demote them in news feeds. In early tests, the new algorithm successfully reduced the visibility of objectionable content. But it also lowered the number of times users opened Facebook, an internal metric known as “sessions” that executives monitor closely.
“The results were good except that it led to a decrease in sessions, which motivated us to try a different approach,” according to a summary of the results, which was posted to Facebook’s internal network and reviewed by The Times.
Oh well we can’t have that, can we.
The FREEZE PEACH debates miss that Facebook, in curating your feed and deciding what shares you do and don’t see, is acting as a publisher. If a magazine publisher receives a Holocaust denial article they’re not like “oh well, gotta publish it now, if I didn’t that’d be censorship”. That’s not how that works.
I’m not even going to pretend that balancing diversity of opinion up against “accuracy”, as determined by some publisher who might be wrong about what is and isn’t true, is an easy problem. It never has been. I’m pretty sure just about any heuristic would be better than “whatever drives the most sessions” though.
I would think that even if short term data shows reduction in sessions, the long term data would show a bigger reduction in sessions from people just not wanting to expose themselves constantly to objectionable material.
Eh? Leaving aside that what was judged “bad for the world” was presumably in aggregate across all users and individual users might not agree…
Don’t mean this to be antagonistic but this post reads like it’s from 2008 or something. Material which riles people up is addictive, it keeps them coming back for more outrage. That’s what drives the entire social media machine. We’re not talking “bad for the world” like child porn or something, we’re talking posts about how some group of other people are hell bent on destroying America.
This is true, but “we’ll do something but only if its perfect and has no risk” is a framing conservatives use to block any government action. Managing unintended consequences is good governance, but for alot of conservatives its insincere and is just motivated by not wanting to pay taxes.
This is an annoying image because it hits on people’s intuitive understanding of the 2nd law of thermodynamics with the obvious energy losses through the long distribution chain, thus making the viewer feel smarter than the smug green bike rider. As with most complex ideas presented to conservatives they’ll have no idea how to actually evaluate what’s occurring in enough detail to identify the inefficiencies and evaluate the best methods for powering the bicycle. It won’t matter though because they’ll leave feeling like science can be understood through common sense just as well as egghead math equations and they’ve got just as much of that, if not more than anyone. As a piece of fossil fuel propaganda it’s actually pretty good.
You know what really grinds my gears? When people on Facebook post pictures of their renovated rooms but the before and after pics are all out of order and from different angles. The hell we doing?
Just took facebook off my phone. Will see how effective this is. I still use facebook messenger regularly.
Just too many lost hours to addictive video scrolling. When i look back on my life, im definitely gonna regret the days of my life watching people drop stuff from a 45 meter platform onto other stuff.
When I first saw this, it set off a debate in my head.
Outside of donating to horrible people I am wondering if I would want my Head of Public Policy personally donating to anyone. I guess? You cant enforce that but just seems like the goals of such a position might create conflicts, even if attempted to use in concert with the job.
After seeing the goat story again, I realize Zuckerberg is the final product of the villain blueprint used in TVs, movies and books over the last 50 plus years.
I deleted it years ago but they still send me e-mails like “SEE WHAT YOUR FRIEND MICHAEL MCAWESOME IS POSTING ON FACEBOOK!!!” fuck you Zuck, diagf for real bro.
