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by ricw
1716 days ago
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Can you then explain why, as the whistleblower alleges, all the programs to keep the newsfeed "clean" for the 2020 election campaign were turned off a month or two after the election? This would have certainly lead to a degradation of all the non-engagement metrics. It seems inconsistent with what is being leaked right now from within FB. In my opinion, what you describe is what facebook wants people to believe, but actively undermines and internally prevents from happening. In other words, tracking wellbeing / non-engagement metrics and everything around it is PR that seemingly even employees are made to believe. |
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I can't speak to most of the product surfaces but for those that I'm familiar with, the most accurate description of what happened is that approved, tested changes that were known to affect so-called "civic integrity" were delayed until after the election to avoid breaking anything or regressing civic integrity until after the election.
For this next part I'm mostly just speculating, but I think I have a more informed opinion on this than most outside of Facebook: It's important to understand how FB measures civic integrity. Facebook generally uses "prevalence" metrics for these things, which look something like "the percent of sessions in which the viewer saw at least one item classified as X", where here X would be something like "civic misinformation" or "inauthentic civic engagement". After the election, bots and bad actors were much less active and invested, so prevalence automatically went down. Since FB makes shipping decisions in part based on prevalence, this decrease means that there is more "budget" to regress these metrics.
Put another way, Facebook sets goals about the overall prevalence of bad content, so when that bad content goes away for exogenous reasons, Facebook can do more things that trade off engagement metrics for prevalence of bad content.