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by bjt 1724 days ago
If you're trying to optimize for engagement AND avoid rewarding divisive content or misinformation, then yeah, that's complex and maybe impossible.

But as Haugen points out in her 60 Minutes interview, they don't _have_ to optimize for engagement above all else. They have tools to drive down divisiveness and disinformation. They just choose to leave them turned off most of the time.
1 comments
_3u10 1724 days ago
wouldn’t turning down divisiveness require picking a unified POV?

What if the unified POV is not the one she wants, would she still support it?

People seemed pretty upset that FB was used to unify a majority for Trump, I mean that’s when all the complaints really started.

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manquer 1724 days ago
There is no need for any unified Point of View. From UX changes ( stop showing like/view counts) there are a ton of things a platform can do if they don't want to optimize for engagement, it will be financially damaging to do so, their revenue and stock price will drop no company will do it, but it not a hard problem technically.

Optimizing for engagement inevitably leads to toxic and unhealthy ecosystem sooner or later.

Issues with facebook and the right wing becoming more extreme long before Trump became mainstream ( perhaps it was always there). There was lot of concern noise during the early Tea Party movement in 2010s. There was a lot of toxic content when Obama became president.

Facebook started as tool to rate looks of female students in Harvard , I don't think there was ever a time when Facebook was not toxic.

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_3u10 1723 days ago
The ecosystem seems pretty healthy... are users leaving?

It seems that there is a subset of the populace whose opinions you disagree with and want FB to stop serving those users. If female users didn't want to be rated, why would they post photos and encourage people to 'like' them? It seems FB/IG has found a set of users who want to rate photos and a set of users who want to upload photos to be rated. How is this 'toxic'?

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manquer 1723 days ago
healthy in the context emotionally/ mentally for the user.

It is toxic when said users are teenagers and pre-teens, that is the whole point of all the Instagram / Facebook public discourse recently .

At that age as a society we have decided they cannot take certain decisions on their own, which is why Sex, Alcohol, Marriage , Content with Rating PG/R, admission to certain venues, etc are all regulated.

Why should Social Media be different ?

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