Well, duh. If people are fighting they are definitely "engaged", but not in a good way. Defining that more engagement equals more success is what made social networks so toxic. The current state that more eyeballs equals more ad money needs to change.
In my case, it's not that easy. Simply posting factual news updates is often enough to trigger wild responses. For example, a few months ago I attended a city council meeting and wrote a Facebook post during the meeting saying "City has approved a new 70 unit condo project" with a picture of the plans. It was one of the most toxic comment sections I've ever seen simply because some people disagreed with the action being taken. Not my actions, but the actions I was reporting on. The answer certainly is not to stop reporting the news.
On a side note, your comment comes dangerously close to sounding like a personal attack. Perhaps I'm reading it wrong but it seems like you're saying if you have problems on Facebook (which I and the person you're responding to have said we do), we must be pathetic and posting like edgy children seeking the toxicity we find. If that's not your intention, maybe you could clarify?
Don't be fooled.. Someone is spot checking the training data against the output at a statistically valid sampling interval.. ML in this case is the data equivalent of a limited liability corp..
because one wants to make sure ones program is operating as intended?
These companies can easily put a filter over this engagement maximization algorithm and they are choosing not to.
I, for one, welcome our mechanical overlords.
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And it is worth noting that if these companies could stop this with limited engagement impact, they totally would as it would get them out of the horrible political hole they are in right now.
tl;dr: “everyone i dislike is a nazi or something close” syndrome
I have ~3k followers on one of my pages. Usually ~200-300 people see any given post if it has no engagements. If it has normal engagement, it might get to 1000-2000 views, still short of my follower count. If it has sparked controversy and there is a fight, I've had the views spike up over 8000-9000 without any shares. Facebook posts to your timeline "your friend commented on this" and others start piling in too. Facebook emails me saying "this post is getting more attention than 95% of the rest of your posts, please pay us money to show it to more people". The more toxic the comments, the more views it gets and the more Facebook begs me to pay them for it.
That's the problem with these algorithms that humans don't watch over. Usually it works great and good content is seen by the people who want to see it. But every now and again it goes out of control and people end up getting hurt and Facebook/Twitter profit from it and even promote it. And as the person who posted it, I have zero ways to stop it from spreading other than deleting the post.
-edit- oh another story... I run a news site for a town, lets call it Townsville. There is another Townsville in another state, but it is not my Townsville. I had a post go super viral, 90,000 views from my 3k followers, because somehow the post made it to the wrong Townsville and 87,000 people were being shown the wrong news article. Again, I had no way to stop this, no tools to correct it. Absolute insanity.