[easterncalculus]

Honest question, what are you referring to when in regards to published/public content?

All of these topics you've mentioned are and always have been far away from trending ('amplified', 'normalized') pages. You can't go anywhere on these sites and see these topics without searching for them, and when you do the hashtags are either immediately taken over by the rest of the users on the site or taken off of trending deliberately by administrators, often both. Can you provide one example of these topics consistently being 'amplified' or 'normalized' by one of the major tech platforms? I'm talking public content, not private groups. Posts that are 'amplified', not just present. You can find posts from anyone about anything online, so I don't really see what separates these private facebook groups from something like a mailing list. It doesn't seem "normalized" at all.

[ryandrake]

I’m going by what the article said: “Facebook spent the past year allowing election conspiracies and far-right militia activity to proliferate on its platform, laying the groundwork for the broader radicalization that fueled the Capitol insurrection in the first place.”

Facebook exercises editorial control (moderation) of what user-provided content is published on its site. Therefore if something is there, it’s because their moderation system allowed it to be there. I don’t use Facebook myself so I can’t provide a first-hand example, but it’s increasingly being reported that this content spreads virally through these platforms’ recommendation rabbit-holes and through promotion by end users.

[easterncalculus]

I also don't use Facebook which is why I was asking. Supposedly after some more research it seems that Facebook has a feature that actually recommends private groups to people, which I was not aware of. It's interesting that they choose to do that, then.