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Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

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Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#41

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

dan-robertson wrote: post #21
mdaidc wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When corporations hide facts we call them immoral, and when they publish the facts we are scratching our heads? Facebook does a lot of internal research which to me seems to be coming from a good place. Doing that research carries a lot of risk for them; e.g. the recent 'whistleblowers' mainly leaked that exact research reports. But instead of giving Facebook credit for even doing that, we always take a negative appr…

Yeah I also find it surprising that people are shocked that Facebook have internal studies into e.g. whether instagram causes depression in teenage girls (answer: inconclusive), like they’re a bad company for investigating whether their products have negative effects on people…

The shock comes because it doesn’t fit the narrative that Facebook is all evil, all the time. Nuance, complexity, and evenness are lost on some. No one and nothing is all bad all the time.

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#42

Post by minimaxir »

Traster wrote: post #28

I can't help but think it's not a coincidence that Facebook decides to produce a content report that lists the top 20 most viewed items and it just so happens that the top 20 items are inexplicably spam. Either facebook is enitrely dominated by spam (possible) or facebook figured out they could just boost a few items to make sure anything embarassing doens't make the short list.

The entire existence of the Facebook Transparency report is as a counter to the Facebook Top 10 Twitter account (https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10) showing that Facebook tends to surface right-wing content.

Facebook prefers to be known for facilitating spam than right-wing content.

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#43

Post by miohtama »

ALittleLight wrote: post #25

A while back I was trying to get twitter followers. I experimented with a few different strategies - quick reactions to big accounts I agreed with or disagreed with, saying what I thought people wanted to hear, saying what I thought would be controversial hot takes, tweeting about everything trending, etc. I basically got no traction. I was getting low tens of thousands of impressions a month according to the twitter…

> I just followed people at random.

AFAIK follower building like this is now banned in Twitter ToS

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#44

Post by rob74 »

klyrs wrote: post #37
snowwrestler wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every reply so far has missed the point of this sentence, so here it is: Facebook reporting accurately is sane, but Facebook is in charge of what is being reported, which is not sane. Like, imagine if your friend was slowly poisoning himself by flavoring his food with lead for a month. Even if he is honest with you about what he’s been doing, it’s still not a sane situation. If anything it’s less sane to be seemingly…

It's more complicated than that. Facebook is a company. People in different parts of the company do different things, have different motivations, etc. One cannot look at a large organization as an individual. I tried to come up with a more apt analogy... but analogies are awful here.

So, probably lots of people actually did notice it, and either (a) shrugged and thought "not my job", or (b) notified someone else about it, who then did (a)?

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#45

Post by mitchdoogle »

Traster wrote: post #28

I can't help but think it's not a coincidence that Facebook decides to produce a content report that lists the top 20 most viewed items and it just so happens that the top 20 items are inexplicably spam. Either facebook is enitrely dominated by spam (possible) or facebook figured out they could just boost a few items to make sure anything embarassing doens't make the short list.

The purpose of this report is to show widely-viewed content. Maybe the embarrassing stuff is not as widely-viewed as you imagine.

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#46

Post by jazzyjackson »

cj wrote: post #40
klyrs wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more complicated than that. Facebook is a company. People in different parts of the company do different things, have different motivations, etc. One cannot look at a large organization as an individual. I tried to come up with a more apt analogy... but analogies are awful here.

If it were a tiny thing that slipped under the radar, I'd buy it, but if my company were being dinged in the media every day for spreading misinformation, I would make sure the whole company is hyperaware of how misinformation spreads... which is often through viral posts and pages. I don't think this sort of oversight is something to blame on corporate bureaucracy.

maybe these junk posts are all that’s left to boost after tamping down the obvious misinformation and political propaganda

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#47

Post by ffhhj »

FredPret wrote: post #31
h2odragon wrote: post #22

"The Algorithm" or "Its Zuckerberg's fault" etc are all simplistic, comforting narratives to distract from the horrifying truth. The Clickfarm bots and fake account NPCs have collectively achieved an emergent intelligence. We humans aren't the majority of our social networks anymore, and we don't have any idea what it is the bots are pushing for. The people we want to hold accountable for this mess are being run over…

That's a book I'd read

Waiting for the movie of the book

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#48

Post by jonas21 »

thinkloop wrote: post #39
snowwrestler wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every reply so far has missed the point of this sentence, so here it is: Facebook reporting accurately is sane, but Facebook is in charge of what is being reported, which is not sane. Like, imagine if your friend was slowly poisoning himself by flavoring his food with lead for a month. Even if he is honest with you about what he’s been doing, it’s still not a sane situation. If anything it’s less sane to be seemingly…

It doesn't seem like facebook pumped the whole page, all other posts have extremely low engagement, literally < 10 likes. What's wrong with pumping individual "good" posts? If anything it can be seen as honorable/egalitarian giving folks a chance to make it even if they aren't some media behemoth.

This is the central tragedy of Facebook.

They set out to build a platform where anyone, no matter how small, could compete with big media on a level playing field based on a straightforward metric: whether a user cares enough about a post that they're willing to engage with it. Publishers get rewarded for producing compelling content, users get to see more content they care about, and Facebook makes money since people spend more time on the site. Everybody wins.

And they succeeded wildly at this. But as it turns out, the things people respond to most are spam and hate and conspiracy theories.

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#49

Post by [deleted] »

deathanatos wrote: post #13
hirundo wrote: post #5

"Facebook flipped a switch, favoring comments and reactions over shares, and suddenly a food blogger from Utah became the largest publisher in the country, if not the world." While the firehose volume is disproportionate, the direction wasn't random. Whoever is copywriting these messages is an artist, drawing an outstanding number of responses. I felt the urge to react when I read them and bravely restrained myself.…

> I felt the urge to react when I read them and bravely restrained myself. You feel an urge to react at bizarro twilight zone non-sequitur text posts? I'm sitting here trying to fathom why millions of people would even react to something like that. Like… what was "thumbs up" worthy in any of those?

[deleted]

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#50

Post by jancsika »

mdaidc wrote: post #19
creato wrote: post #2

I greatly enjoyed this sentence: > The one mystery we weren’t able to figure out is why any sane person working at Facebook would feel comfortable publishing a content report that admitted that the most viral publisher on its platform this year was a barely active drop-shipping scam page full of stolen video content run by an LLC that doesn’t even exist anymore.

When corporations hide facts we call them immoral, and when they publish the facts we are scratching our heads? Facebook does a lot of internal research which to me seems to be coming from a good place. Doing that research carries a lot of risk for them; e.g. the recent 'whistleblowers' mainly leaked that exact research reports. But instead of giving Facebook credit for even doing that, we always take a negative appr…

> When corporations hide facts we call them immoral

Not really.

When corporations hide externalities that negatively impact the entire population we call them immoral.

I mean, nobody has ever called KFC immoral for having "secret spices."

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