Sheera Frenkel

Cecilia Kang

Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination

An Ugly Truth

Facebook on its mission to 'connect people'. Love the price that not Meta, but humans have to pay for that. 

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"That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs someone a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people. The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good."

Trump and the Russian hackers had separately come to the same conclusion: they could exploit Facebook's algorithms to work in their favor. Users could not resist the incendiary messages of populist politicians. Whether they agreed or disagreed, they engaged.

The root of the disinformation problem, of course, lay in the technology. Facebook was designed to throw gas on the fire of any speech that invoked an emotion, even if it was hateful speech - its algorithms favored sensationalism.

The company banned violence, pornography, and terrorism - in those cases, Al systems caught and removed more than 90 percent of the content on their own. But when it came to hate speech, Facebook's systems proved reliably unreliable. Hate speech wasn't easily defined; it was constantly changing and culturally specific. New terms, ideas, and slogans were emerging daily, and only human beings deeply enmeshed in the world of the extreme, far-right movements cultivating such speech could keep up with its nuances.

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