LONDON (Bywire News) - In the argument over political content on its platform, Facebook has undergone a remarkable series of contortions over the last couple of years. From initial denial to promising to take action, they have now arrived at a new line of defence: ‘it’s not our fault’.
That’s what one Facebook executive appeared to claim in an interview with Politico when he claimed that right-wing populism has a ‘huge advantage’ because it is more engaging.
“Right-wing populism is always more engaging,” he told Politico reporters before adding that the content speaks to an ‘incredibly strong, primitive emotion’ by touching on topics such as ‘nation, protection, the other, anger, fear.’
This, he claimed, had always been the case right back to the days of Goebbels and beyond.
“That was there in the '30s. That's not invented by social media — you just see those reflexes mirrored in social media, they’re not created by social media,” the executive added. “It's why tabloids do better than the [Financial Times], and it's also a human thing. People respond to engaging emotion much more than they do to, you know, dry coverage. ….This wasn't invented 15 years ago when Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook.”
It is true that some of the worst regimes in history have also been some of the best storytellers. They had to be. Had Hitler stood up and shouted ‘let’s attack all the world’s biggest powers at the same time and ship half your neighbours off to death camps’ he would have struggled to make it out of the room, let alone into power.
However, Facebook misses an important point. Engagement is decided by algorithms and is designed by human beings. How they work, and any biases they inherited, come directly from the human engineers who create them.
If those algorithms are indeed favouring right-wing sites, that’s not by accident, and the stats paint a pretty clear picture. As the Politico article shows, Facebook in 2020 has been dominated by conservative voices outside the ‘mainstream media’. Ben Shapiro, David Harris, and ‘Blue Lives Matter all top rankings according to Facebook’s own tool Crowdtangle. Donald Trump’s personal page also regularly at the top of the list allowing him to become a publisher of considerable influence in his own right.
It enables him to navigate around the media. It doesn’t matter if the vast majority of mainstream outlets are hostile to him; indeed, he can even use that to his advantage. Facebook allows him to plug directly into the minds of those people he is trying to reach.
Facebook has become a key battleground in the upcoming election. Both sides are spending millions on targeted ads, but what they both want is organic, earned, content which spreads of its own accord. Here, Donald Trump is beating Joe Biden hands down.
Facebook claims this is all beyond their control, but they design the algorithm which decides what is, and what isn’t engaging. If Facebook has become a petri dish for right-wing conspiracy theories, it’s because they have purposely made it that way.
For example, Facebook’s reactions buttons, rolled out in 2016, give users more options about how they would like to engage with a post. Rather than just liking a post, you could express a range of emotions such as sadness or anger.
However, Facebook’s algorithms treat each of those emotions the same, as a form of engagement which will boost the profile of those posts.
The same is true over on Twitter, where engagement is not necessarily an endorsement of the content. Indeed, Twitter users are more likely to share content which has made them angry or with which they strongly disagree so they can tell the world just how much they hate it and the author.
This is why people such as Katie Hopkins do so well. At least half of their engagement comes from people who hate their content. They have become professional trolls and, thanks to Twitter, have opened up a new way to gain attention as a journalist: to be as offensive as you possibly can.
Once again there is nothing accidental or coincidental about the way these algorithms work. They have been carefully designed to function in this way by human engineers. In other words, the only reason right-wing content has an advantage on Facebook, and other mainstream social media outlets, is that they have been designed that way.
Another approach
Facebook’s argument might be a little stronger were it not for the fact that there are other social media sites out there showing a very different approach. The recently launched Voice Social, for example, offers a glimpse of what society could be.
Based on the blockchain and founded by Block.one, Voice demands any user verify their identity as a real human before being allowed onto the platform. Once on, you will be rewarded for positive engagement with tokens and greater visibility.
This is the anti-Facebook. It’s a place where bots are forbidden rather than encouraged, where trolls get nowhere and content is verifiable and trustworthy. If all social media were like this, the likes of Cambridge Analytica and Dominic Cummings would have got nowhere.
It points the way to a very different future for social media; one in which information can be trusted and verified, and where platforms work for the users rather than the other way around.
Facebook, meanwhile, seems set on its course of denial. Although many within the organisation appear concerned about the political influence their platform wields, any moves to change face resistance from the very top.
In 2018, Mark Zuckerberg refused to remove posts denying the holocaust. Last year, he defended his decision not to act on disinformation by running the freedom of speech line. ‘I don’t think it’s right for a private company to censor politicians or the news in a democracy,’ he told a group of students at Georgetown.
The truth is that Facebook profits from hate. This month, an engineer, Ashok Chandwaney, quit the company telling staff that he could no “longer stomach contributing to an organization that is profiting off hate in the U.S. and globally.”
All that dark money channelled into sponsored posts flows into the social media giant’s coffers. While Facebook claims it has taken down millions of offensive posts, it only acts when forced. Their recent decision to ban political ads in the run-up to the election is, like everything else, a fig leaf to cover up a problem which they see as being down to nothing more than PR.
Moves such as that show that Facebook is sensitive to its public reputation, but its model is fundamentally broken. It’s only through moving to new platforms and new models such as Voice that social media can again become a force for good.
(Written by Tom Cropper, Edited by Klaudia Fior)