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- Hacker News
- Every other day, my feed seems to be filled with pro-Republican posts, followed by pro-Democratic posts the next. It’s fascinating how the model decided this was the kind of content worth generating.by ravivooda
- To some degree I think social media algorithms already altered our behavior enough that extreme and controversial content generation would continue even if we disabled the algorithms. They've reinforced the memes enough now that they are self-sustaining.by 01100011
- "The Model" didn't decide anything. Facebook and these other attention economy companies have been A/B testing for two decades now, and there have been multiple "Metas" they have found. They have all converged eventually on ragebait being an extremely effective engagement driver.
They didn't just run a linear regression or whatever on some data and magically get the most rage inducing system. They made conscious decisions at nearly every step to make changes to optimize for "Engagement", which at this point is a code word that means "Controversial" the same way that a video of someone eating a toddler would be "Controversial"
It's digital crack pointed at a subsection of our brain that evolved to do group signalling.
by mrguyorama - I have a very mixed friend group from hard left and hard right and they all get their own little bubble of rage bait that amplifies their own beliefs. Since i have them in my feed I get this crap from both side in my feed thanks to the algorithms. So i barely touch the site anymoreby christkv
- FB is built on rage bait, what else do they have beside cute videos?by bwb
- I use FB for genealogy, because there are a lot of local groups where people post historical pictures, and older people in general are more active on Facebook.
I've seen some local groups taken over by ragebait slop, though. Ironically, not even right wing rage bait slop. As far as I can tell, it finally boiled over for the admin of the page, who was a fairly liberal guy in an extremely rural place, when a local museum found out he was anti-Trump and stopped collaborating with him on local history (maybe for fear of other's reactions). Since then he's strictly reposted rage material from other places/people on Facebook, much of it clearly low effort/AI generated.
I can't judge him, he lives there after all, and from this side of the ocean my political sympathies are definitively closer to him than to his enemies. Still :/
by vintermann - If you use the friends or "all" feeds, you just get stuff about what your friends are up to and things from pages you've subscribed to. Or I do anyway. Also good for discovering events locally.
Even the main feed isn't that bad for me. I guess it depends who your friends are and what you click on.
by Joeboy - Connecting with your friends and family. Unfortunately they abandoned this long ago because they weren't satisfied with making a mountain of money.by basisword
- Marketplace. It’s pretty good that’s my main usage of Facebook nowadaysby haunter
- Unfortunately things like craigslist died off and moved to Facebook marketplace somehow. I have to ask my wife to post things for me.by wookmaster
- Horrible sympathy and religion bait like "I bet nobody will upvote this poor sick child with one leg, won't you? 1 amen = 1 prayer!"by code_duck
- Just to add onto this; Instagram purposely floats controversial comments to the top of a comment section for "engagement" purposes. I've seen this many times.by khernandezrt
- I've noticed that when my partner and I look at the same Instagram post (within a few minutes of each other), we get completely different "top" comments. I suspect Instagram is ordering the comments individually for each user to maximize engagement.
All social media is drifting towards being a mirror that reflects your worst tendencies back at you. No content restrictions will fix this - the whole personalized approach to media is fundamentally rotten.
by AlexandrB - Facebook figured out a long time ago that "ragebait" and profit are transitively connected via "engagement". They recognized that anger, hate, fear, and all negative emotions can ALSO bring in a LOT of clicks.by superxpro12
- This is true of every social media that operates around engagement. Reddit, twitter, tiktok, etc. the model failed in every way except for making money. Hell, it's true of hacker news sometimes!
- Recent Guardian article:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49237298“Inside a meme factory: meet one of thousands of Indonesians trading political outrage clicks for Facebook cash“by Barbing - > "it is not Meta's role to police offensiveness"
Just to fund, transmit, amplify, protect, and profit from it.
by wpietri - How do you feel about bookstores stocking titles like "Steal This Book"? What about libraries?by xhkkffbf
- Zuck was gagging for the Trump 2nd term so he could go all in on this shit. Slow clap for the Meta employees that enable it.by phatfish
- And of course publish it.
Logically we might expect Meta to get into selling narcotics next.
"It is not Meta's role to police drug use"
- The egregious part is the amplification part. Profit derives from that. Transmission and protection are neutral and they are necessary for all information especially if there is a history of freedom of expression; though of course some governments and others like regulating permissible expression.by mc32
- This isn't anything new, it was abundantly clear after Facebook removed their fact checking team during covid that the priority was engagement over everything else, and rage bait is exactly that.by bilekas
- I just want to add, that they (FB and other big social media) probably understood what propaganda power they wield after 2016 facebook and cambridge analytica scandal.
Personally - I think that this was the moment when silicon valley billionaires without shadow of a doubt understood that they have power what used to be reserved only for state actors. Bonus - for using that power they get fined penny on the dollar at most or just slap on the wrist.
Update: now situation is even worse - states actively buy propaganda with social media companies, making those companies even more rich and influential.
by trymas - COVID-era “fact checking” went way beyond its remit and started to become a political tool. This had negative consequences for the average person’s trust in institutions of all kinds, because people really don’t like it when you attempt to police their individual political speech, even if it’s clearly inaccurate (as it so often is). It’s a good thing that it was removed.
The problem with Meta is the monetization and engagement model, not the lack of fact checking.
by iamnothere - Facebook is still big in my country, Lithuania, and both rage-bait and other type of fringe content is rampant, and even worse after fact-checking was removed. It is wild, and with some outside actors (specific country that shall not be named) it is a big problem with political and social effects being felt IRL.by fosron
- Fact checking removal really made it way worse....
- And is Lithuania doing anything about it? In Romania Facebook and TikTok do whatever they please, and whatever they are paid to do, with complete impunity as the authorities actively do nothing at all.by soco
- I will call out the ABC here for taking a lot of the boots on the ground work that Tom Tanuki - independent journo (https://youtube.com/@tomtanuki) has done with these far right slopaganda mills, slicing off the prior recognition and pretending it's a big new problem they just found. While a bit of this is new... Is it that new? Is this report that detailed? Hmmmmmby florkbork
- Last Week Tonight has also done multiple bits on this topic over the years, with one during the current season with list of prior offenses.by stevenwoo
- Well, they claim they've done their own independent investigations, maybe started because of that bloggers/vloggers work, but still could be independent. What exactly is pointing towards it not being independent? It seems to be a detailed enough account of why the people break Facebook's own guidelines, yet receive money from Facebook.