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Firehose of toxicity

Kudzu invasion, by FrenchKheldar via Creative Commons

Facebook is a Nazi firehose” is the title of Scott Lemieux’s Lawyers, Guns & Money post that caught my eye. Lemieux points to a report by MSNBC’s Brandy Zadrozny on the perverseness of Facebook’s feed algorithm.

A flood of “Facebook is toxic to democracy” stories have surfaced since whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, came forward last summer with tens of thousands of internal documents that formed the basis of the The Facebook Files multi-part investigation from The Wall Street Journal and published beginning in in September. Several more have reports based on them appeared in recent days.

“Carol’s Journey to QAnon” is the name of one internal report among thousands of redacted pages released by Haugen’s attorneys to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress. A consortium of news organizations also obtained copies.

Zadrozny writes:

In summer 2019, a new Facebook user named Carol Smith signed up for the platform, describing herself as a politically conservative mother from Wilmington, North Carolina. Smith’s account indicated an interest in politics, parenting and Christianity and followed a few of her favorite brands, including Fox News and then-President Donald Trump.

Though Smith had never expressed interest in conspiracy theories, in just two days Facebook was recommending she join groups dedicated to QAnon, a sprawling and baseless conspiracy theory and movement that claimed Trump was secretly saving the world from a cabal of pedophiles and Satanists.

Smith didn’t follow the recommended QAnon groups, but whatever algorithm Facebook was using to determine how she should engage with the platform pushed ahead just the same. Within one week, Smith’s feed was full of groups and pages that had violated Facebook’s own rules, including those against hate speech and disinformation.

Smith wasn’t a real person. A researcher employed by Facebook invented the account, along with those of other fictitious “test users” in 2019 and 2020, as part of an experiment in studying the platform’s role in misinforming and polarizing users through its recommendations systems.

That researcher said Smith’s Facebook experience was “a barrage of extreme, conspiratorial, and graphic content.” 

A similar pattern emerges in India too (New York Times):

On Feb. 4, 2019, a Facebook researcher created a new user account to see what it was like to experience the social media site as a person living in Kerala, India.

For the next three weeks, the account operated by a simple rule: Follow all the recommendations generated by Facebook’s algorithms to join groups, watch videos and explore new pages on the site.

The result was an inundation of hate speech, misinformation and celebrations of violence, which were documented in an internal Facebook report published later that month.

“Following this test user’s News Feed, I’ve seen more images of dead people in the past three weeks than I’ve seen in my entire life total,” the Facebook researcher wrote.

It’s not that Facebook does not try to moderate and eliminate hate speech, but that it does not understand the cultures where it’s introduced and under-resources efforts to curb misinformation and violent content outside the U.S.

Facebook did not have enough resources in India and was unable to grapple with the problems it had introduced there, including anti-Muslim posts, according to its documents. Eighty-seven percent of the company’s global budget for time spent on classifying misinformation is earmarked for the United States, while only 13 percent is set aside for the rest of the world — even though North American users make up only 10 percent of the social network’s daily active users, according to one document describing Facebook’s allocation of resources.

Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesman, said the figures were incomplete and don’t include the company’s third-party fact-checking partners, most of whom are outside the United States.

Publicity surrounding The Facebook Files reports have prompted another whistleblower to come forward echoing Haugen’s allegations. This one alleges in an SEC affidfavit submitted Friday that “the company prizes growth and profits over combating hate speech, misinformation and other threats to the public,” according to The Washington Post’s reporting. While the whistleblower’s name is redacted in filings, the person’s identity is known to the Post:

As the company sought to quell the political controversy during a critical period in 2017, Facebook communications official Tucker Bounds allegedly said, according to the affidavit, “It will be a flash in the pan. Some legislators will get pissy. And then in a few weeks they will move onto something else. Meanwhile we are printing money in the basement, and we are fine.”

Bounds, now a vice president of communications, said in a statement to The Post, “Being asked about a purported one-on-one conversation four years ago with a faceless person, with no other sourcing than the empty accusation itself, is a first for me.”

Facebook is on defense.

The SEC affidavit goes on to allege that Facebook officials routinely undermined efforts to fight misinformation, hate speech and other problematic content out of fear of angering then-President Donald Trump and his political allies, or out of concern about potentially dampening the user growth key to Facebook’s multi-billion-dollar profits.

[…]

The whistleblower told The Post of an occasion in which Facebook’s Public Policy team, led by former Bush administration official Joel Kaplan, defended a “white list” that exempted Trump-aligned Breitbart News, run then by former White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon, and other select publishers from Facebook’s ordinary rules against spreading false news reports.

When a person in the video conference questioned this policy, Kaplan, the vice president of global policy, responded by saying, “Do you want to start a fight with Steve Bannon?” according to the whistleblower in The Post interview.

The Guardian’s report adds:

Haugen in her testimony [to Congress] stated that Facebook at one point tweaked its algorithm to improve safety and decrease inflammatory content but abandoned the changes after the election, a decision that Haugen tied directly to the 6 January riot at the Capitol. Facebook also disbanded the civic integrity team after the election.

“As soon as the election was over, they turned them back off or they changed the settings back to what they were before, to prioritize growth over safety. And that really feels like a betrayal of democracy to me,” she said in her testimony on 5 October.

Referring to the algorithm change, Haugen added: “Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads, and [Facebook] will make less money.”

Facebook is simply another corporate beast unleashed on the world in the name of maximizing profits. The specifics of Facebook’s corporate culture or Mark Zuckerberg’s personality are not the core issue. The flaw is not in Facebook or its algorithms but in the DNA underlying the modern corporation, in its basic programming which shall not be questioned. Like kudzu introduced in the South to control erosion, it spreads unchecked. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

I wrote here once, “We upgrade our hardware and software every couple of years. When was the last time capitalism got a new operating system? And what might that look like?

What Milton Friedman called capitalism in 1962 looks more like an economic cult today. Question the basic assumptions behind corporate capitalism, publicly point out its shortcomings and suggest we are overdue for an upgrade, and the Chamber of Commerce practically bursts through the door like the Spanish Inquisition to accuse you of communism and heresy. Why you … you want to punish success! It’s weirdly reflexive and a mite hysterical. What their blind fealty and knee-jerk defense of this one particular style for organizing a capitalist enterprise says about them, I’ll leave for now. It suffices to say I find it rather peculiar.

We think we invented capitalism. Yet there have been “capitalist acts between consenting adults”* since before Hammurabi. We don’t call one capitalist enterprise the world’s oldest profession for nothing. There’s a restaurant in China that has been in operation for nearly 1000 years. And pubs in England that have been in business for 900. All without being incorporated in Delaware or the Cayman Islands. (Communists?)

The fetish for the current economic model isn’t about money or ideology, but, like The Matrix, about control. For some and not for others. Working people in the first Gilded Age, says Fraser, “summoned up a kind of political will and the political imagination” to civilize capitalism,” to say to themselves, “we are not fated to live this way.”

Suggest we examine alternative models and they’ll brand you a communist.

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