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Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

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Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#71

Post by MrAwesome »

snowwrestler wrote: post #26
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.

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…

Ex-FB here. My guess is that it's primarily a combination of two factors:

1) Someone / some org was slow to notice that this was happening. 2) Bureaucratic muck slowed resolution down. Even once escalated, there would be a lot of red tape to go through to make the necessary changes to how things are ranked. The people noticing the problem most likely aren't the people able to make changes, the changes would need to be tested at scale and their effects evaluated, and the people making the changes would have a lot of deliberating, politicking, explaining, and appeasing to do. Add onto that that everyone is stressed out of their minds, worried about performance reviews, and having to balance changes they want to make against how they and everyone else are evaluated at perf time...

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#72

Post by rand49an »

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…

Didn't their own research show that it made 13% of teenage girls who use the platform seriously depressed?

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#73

Post by stefan_ »

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…

I think you are just missing the backstory. Of course if you are approaching what Facebook does with naivety you end up sounding.. naive.

The whole reason this report was put out by Facebook in the first place is because people used their own tool Crowdtangle to point out how the most popular pages of all were pushing political and medical misinformation to billions and were run by foreign spam mills. So they gutted Crowdtangle and published this report cleansed of any reference to "questionable" pages. But as a previous submission [1] showed, the numbers they state don't add up. And as this submission shows, if you dig into what Facebook wants to tell you is popular, it's all still the most garbage, devoid of value scam content - and it is their algorithm that is promoting it above all.

1: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2021/08/18/facebooks-new-transpar...

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#74

Post by jefftk »

rand49an wrote: post #72
dan-robertson wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Didn't their own research show that it made 13% of teenage girls who use the platform seriously depressed?

The reporting on this study has been terrible. It was a really small study of female teenage Instagram users who reported having various problems. Of them, 13% blamed Instagram for making things worse, which was actually less than the number that said Instagram made things better. And this is all based on self-reported data anyway, so none of us should be taking it very seriously.

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#75

Post by kingcharles »

ryandrake wrote: post #69
brendoelfrendo wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the "who here has never had a DUI?" question is tailored for engagement. The actual % of people who have had a DUI is really low, and so the number of people who can engage with that honestly is really high. Then there's the fact that DUIs tend to evoke a strong moral response, so people will dive into the comments to wag the finger at all the DUI havers. We're all here commenting on posts about tech and tech…

Reminds me of those posts from a few years ago that were like: "[Simple math problem, like what's 5 x 4?]: 95% of people can't solve this! I bet you can't either!" With hundreds of thousands of commenters "engaging" with it. I don't understand anything about this behavior. 1. What does the poster have to gain from a post like that, 2. What do all the commenters have to gain, and 3. What does SocialMediaCompany gain?…

The poster gains by getting a large amount of interaction with their page, which is certainly a ranking factor for future posts. e.g. SocialMediaCompany will say "This new post by Poster will get higher placement because their previous posts were enjoyed (interacted with) by many people, and therefore Poster must be producing good content."

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#76

Post by h2odragon »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #18

when I see these posts i always figured it was a kind of bot-net role call. imagine you pay a contractor for one million sock puppets and you want to check how many of them aren’t shadowbanned - the bots already follow each other and are programmed to “engage” with posts their bot-friends engage with, so it becomes a follow the leader effect, and allows the purchaser of a botnet to inspect their army, kind of like Ob…

Interesting notion. I've seen people speculating on "WTF are these nonsensical google ads about", perhaps botnet C&C could be an answer there too.

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#77

Post by xmprt »

rob74 wrote: post #44
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.

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)?

Which is totally fair in my opinion. It is no single individual's job to fix an issue this big and I don't think it's even feasible for a single person to do at a company like this. And if management hasn't set up incentives for people to proactively fix issues like this then they probably won't get fixed. Upper management can and should fix these issues but they probably don't care because they don't think it's an issue.

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#78

Post by xmprt »

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 is that someone at Meta looked into these studies and decided not to take actions to fix it because it might hurt their revenue.

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#79

Post by brendoelfrendo »

ryandrake wrote: post #69
brendoelfrendo wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the "who here has never had a DUI?" question is tailored for engagement. The actual % of people who have had a DUI is really low, and so the number of people who can engage with that honestly is really high. Then there's the fact that DUIs tend to evoke a strong moral response, so people will dive into the comments to wag the finger at all the DUI havers. We're all here commenting on posts about tech and tech…

Reminds me of those posts from a few years ago that were like: "[Simple math problem, like what's 5 x 4?]: 95% of people can't solve this! I bet you can't either!" With hundreds of thousands of commenters "engaging" with it. I don't understand anything about this behavior. 1. What does the poster have to gain from a post like that, 2. What do all the commenters have to gain, and 3. What does SocialMediaCompany gain?…

Well, for (1) the poster gets engagement from low-effort posts. The end game is usually monetizing their social media presence, and though there's multiple ways to do that, they all involve getting eyes on your page.

Your (2) should be evident from the phrasing of your example: if 95% of people can't do it, people want to prove they're in the 5%. They get a few minutes' distraction, some self-satisfaction, and maybe some conversation. I'm not going to play psychologist, but that's enough for some folks. And it really only has to be some: if your post is seen 32 million people and 30 million dismiss it, you still got 2 million people to engage.

(3) is, I guess, money again? Active users means SocialMediaCompany can tout the value of their platform to advertising partners. The bot problem is a good observation, though, because platforms with a reputation for bots are less valuable to advertisers who want human attention. People who act like bots are probably great for advertisers, though, so idk; maybe that's a wash.

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#80

Post by kingcharles »

rconti wrote: post #27
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 suspect it has the same weakness as the "follow back" strategy though. Nobody really cares about the account or connects with it or even understands what you're trying to do. These people aren't your followers so much as they are people who like small talk and coalesced around you for a time. But if the entire point is to get impressions so you can sell a product, or whatever, do you are if people don't particula…

OK, I can give you a real world example of why parent commenter's strategy is useless.

I had two pages on Facebook based on a very popular movie from the 1980s.

One was the actual studio's page for the movie that I was given access to (as the studio admitted they don't give a fuck about any IP that doesn't have an immediate release - e.g. Blu-ray etc - planned for it), which had over 2 million likes. When you opened a Facebook account this page was one of the list that was often presented to a new user as something they should "like".

The other was a fan page I'd made which was niche, had to be actively sought out, and had 30,000 likes.

I experimented with selling branded products through the accounts. The small fan page sold 10X as many products as the official page that had almost 100X more followers.

tl;dr: if you want to sell shit to your followers they need to be engaged with you - just having people follow you on autopilot is going to create nothing of value.

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