Re:What Happened to Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp?
by serial_dev on Monday October 04, 2021 @04:51PM
(#28751926)
I didn't have the time to watch the interview yet but... wasn't it common knowledge for years?
Is there anything else in the interview the whistleblower alleges, or can prove?
Re:What Happened to Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp?
by windowsrookie on Monday October 04, 2021 @05:06PM
(#28752083)
We all knew Facebook is bad for society. The whistleblower showed us that Facebook has done internal studies and that these studies have shown their products are bad for society/contributed to the insurrection/promote human trafficking/damage teen mental health/etc. But even with these studies, Facebook has decided to prioritize growth and revenue, rather than fix the issues that are bad for society. What this whistleblower leaked will hopefully lead to some sort of government regulation on social media.
Without regulation, social media will always prioritize profit.
That is not at all what the whistleblower is alleging. Facebook already controls what content you are seeing through its news feed algorithm. The parameters to that algorithm are not a 1-dimensional "how much control", but instead uses engagement metrics for what content to show. The whistleblower claims that the engagement optimization, according to facebooks own research, prioritizes emotionally angry/hurtful/divisive content.