I've watched the interview as posted on 60 minutes' youtube channel - its here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Lx5VmAdZSI - its 13 minutes long.
What I'm thankful for out of this is a little more public awareness of the engagement engines and incentives that motivate ad revenue based content platforms, driving people towards more extreme content as they'll stay longer on it.
Facebook's policy communications director responded to the piece thus:
> "Every day our teams have to balance protecting the rights of billions of people to express themselves openly with the need to keep our platform a safe and positive space. We continue to make significant improvements to tackle the spread of misinformation and harmful content. To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true.".
Have they visited their platform? The callout here is that it is in fact not a positive place, and that they're directly incentivized to put forward high-engagement content, much of which has negative consequences. The words to reframe it as "bad" content and that they "do nothing" is reflective of the culture they have. Any argument that works regardless of moral reflection, just like any content that gets ad revenue regardless of moral reflection.
I think it would help the discourse and thinking if we sidestep the subject of "who decides what is negative/bad content?". I also think the idea of finding "better incentives" is going to immediately fail, because what sort of incentives could possibly be more alluring to a publicly traded company than massive profit margins? For that reason, I think some simple regulations, not around content, for which regulations already exist and there are incentives to
keep violent content off, but instead around the amplification of content by engagement metrics.
At a very minimum, disallowing amplifying content simply because its being engaged with and being actually content neutral would be a nice step. Twitter's "Top Tweets" setting or "Explore" tab are good examples of this, as is basically the entire feeds of linkedin, facebook, instagram's "Suggested posts", etc.
For Facebook - I would ask them to make tools that let users take control of their own feeds. They absolutely have the ability to allow people to mute political posts if they wished. They could have settings that don’t allow image posts or links, or reposts. Or even hiding the number of likes, reactions and comments on posts. If facebook starts acting as if engagement isn’t the end all be all and maybe I’d start to believe what they say about making their platform a positive space.
For me the promise of Facebook was being able to keep up with what friends and family are doing. The platform is so far away from that I have long since left.