An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination [calibre 4.99.5]

As far as the study was concerned, this meant that Facebook had demonstrated that emotional contagion could be achieved without “direct interaction between people” (because the unwitting subjects were seeing only each other’s News Feeds). It was a dramatic finding.

Once tech and science reporters discovered the paper, it was only a matter of time before it made headlines in the mainstream press. “Facebook Treats You like a Lab Rat,” blared one CNN headline.9 The mood experiment confirmed critics’ assertions of the company’s power to influence ideas and stir outrage; Facebook was operating behind a curtain, like the Wizard of Oz. When press reports and consumer groups put pressure on the company to explain itself, Sandberg instead issued a statement in which she apologized for the company’s clumsy PR. “This was part of ongoing research companies do to test different products, and that was what it was; it was poorly communicated. And for that communication we apologize. We never meant to upset you.”

But Facebook’s engineers, who were not aware of the experiment before the paper was published, recognized that it revealed something more nefarious about the News Feed’s ability to influence people. Over the years, the platform’s algorithms had gotten more sophisticated at identifying the material that appealed most to individual users and were prioritizing it at the top of their feeds. The News Feed operated like a finely tuned dial, sensitive to that photograph a user lingered on longest, or the article they spent the most time reading. Once it had established that the user was more likely to view a certain type of content, it fed them as much of it as possible.

The engineers saw a problem developing and repeatedly tried to raise the alarm with their managers. In a series of posts on Workplace groups, they complained about the clickbait sites’ routinely being promoted to the top of the News Feed, and they asked if the algorithm needed to be reevaluated. One engineer posted a series of examples of false or salacious stories that were going viral, including posts claiming that President Barack Obama had secretly fathered a love child and that a cabal of global elites was hoarding a magical serum for eternal youth. “Is this really the first thing people should be seeing in their feeds?” he asked.

In the fall, several employees confronted Cox and asked him to take their concerns to Zuckerberg. They insisted that he explain to the CEO that something in the algorithm was deeply broken. “Chris told us he sympathized. He saw the problem, too,” one engineer recalled. “We compared what the News Feed was serving up to junk food. It was sugary junk, and we knew it, and it wasn’t healthy, for anyone involved, for us to keep promoting it.”

And yet Cox was torn. Facebook’s users were spending more time on the platform than ever before, and that meant that the systems were working. Sugary junk was addictive, and everyone knew it. Cox held a long view of the News Feed’s merits.

A few weeks later, the engineer followed up with Cox. The company was taking the issue seriously, Cox assured him. There were changes currently under development that would impact the News Feed.

Those changes would take more than six months to unfold and would have little material effect. In June 2015, Facebook announced a change to the News Feed that emphasized “time spent” as the most important metric of activity on Facebook.10 The assumption was that users quickly lost interest in clickbait content, and by prioritizing the duration of interest in content, more legitimate news stories would surface higher in the rankings. The company also began a process of down-ranking sites they believed were “clickbait farms,” or websites that churned out meaningless junk content with no goal other than getting a user to click on it.

Users still clicked on, and spent a significant portion of time reading, junk content, and clickbait sites tweaked their headlines and approaches to avoid being down-ranked. And sensationalist posts continued to rise to the top of the News Feed.

The harms were baked into the design. As Dipayan Ghosh, a former Facebook privacy expert, noted, “We have set ethical red lines in society, but when you have a machine that prioritizes engagement, it will always be incentivized to cross those lines.”