[throwaway84_TO]

That's very fair criticism, and you're right, promoting something to others based on the probability of it triggering a reaction has some pretty major downsides. Although I don't know the specifics of Facebook's algorithms, from my experience, I would agree it seems to amplify posts trigger an emotional response, e.g. "oh, that's so CUTE!", "oh, that's so COOL!", "oh, that's so FUNNY!", "oh, that's so TERRIBLE!", etc.

I guess the only thing that I can say is that it may take a while before we have AI that is capable enough to distinguish baseless posts intended to stir people's emotions from those which may have merit but are emotionally engaging and controversial. In the interim, it seems like Facebook is trying to brute force solve this with human moderators - but again, perhaps not the most objective way of handling this and I wonder how they will tackle this long term.

(On a different note, I'm being throttled by HN for posting too fast, so sorry for the delay in response).