Facebook is well aware that its social platforms, including Instagram, have many flaws that can cause real harm to people. But management, including Mark Zuckerberg, is doing nothing – can’t or won’t – to fix these problems, an investigation by The Wall Street Journal showed.
The stars write what they want
Reporters from The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) examined internal Facebook documents, employee work correspondence, and draft presentations for the company’s top management.
Facebook claims that its rules are the same for everyone, regardless of the position and prominence of the user.
However, in reality, according to the WSJ, the social network has a special program, XCheck, which gives privileges to star users.
The program was conceived as a protection for top accounts, including the pages of celebrities, politicians and journalists from outside unwanted interference. This is how it would work if users who received such protection followed the platform’s rules. But many of them do not consider it necessary to do this.
They post offensive or incriminating information, make statements calling for violence, etc. All this is widely disseminated on the social network, and Facebook employees cannot take emergency measures. Even if their goal is to eliminate content that violates the rules of the platform.
For example, in 2019, football star Neymar posted photos of a naked woman. The lady accused him of rape, and the football player, in order to justify himself, published on his Facebook and Instagram correspondence with her, her nude photo and video, and accused the woman of extortion. The publication hung in Neymar’s account for more than a day, tens of millions saw it. Millions of comments also appeared under the post, including threats against the woman.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg
Photo: AP
Simple moderators could not quickly remove a post from the privileged page: the content was sent for a special multi-level verification by higher-ranking employees. It took quite a long time.
At the same time, the accounts of ordinary people with publications that seemed suspicious to moderators or even an automated content control system are deleted after receiving the first complaint from other users.
Mark Zuckerberg himself admits that 10% of decisions to remove content are made by mistake. At the same time, in some cases, the user is not even explained why his publication was deleted, and they are not given the opportunity to protest this decision.
As documents examined by the WSJ show, Facebook has long admitted that the privilege system under XCheck is unacceptable, that it protects and rewards regular rule breakers. Nevertheless, the program continues to expand.
As of 2020, XCheck has protected approximately 5.8 million users. Among them was Donald Trump and his family members. Mr Trump was only deprived of these privileges after Facebook banned him from using the social network in June this year.
Instagram for kids is not a toy
According to the WSJ, Instagram’s study of the platform’s impact on audience self-esteem and attitude has shown a negative impact on a significant portion of the audience. Instagram turned out to be especially harmful for young people, and most of all for adolescent girls.
“32% of teenage girls say that when they worry about their appearance and shape, Instagram makes them feel even worse,” – stated in an internal presentation of the network.
Research has shown that Instagram is also behind the rise in anxiety and depression in adolescents. Of those young people who admitted having suicidal thoughts, 13% in the UK and 6% in the US linked it to Instagram.
Moreover, some of the identified issues were found to be specific to Instagram. In particular, those that relate to the so-called social comparison – human needs associated with the search for criteria for an accurate assessment of their own qualities, judgments and abilities. TikTok and Snapchat, which are similar in content to Instagram, have a different way of serving content and lack such a strong emphasis on body and lifestyle.
Instagram’s audience is predominantly youth. Therefore, the scale of the threat is great, the WSJ journalists note.
More than 40% of Instagram users are people under the age of 22. In the US, 22 million teenagers go to Instagram every day and spend 50% more time there than, for example, on Facebook. At the same time, the teenagers themselves admitted that they do not like spending so much time on Instagram, but it seems to them that they should do it.
«They often feel that they already have an addiction, and they know that it is bad for their mental health, but do not feel able to stop on their own, ”- said in one of the presentations.
As the analysis of internal documents shows, Facebook’s management is well aware of these facts. But it makes minimal efforts to change the situation, does not publish its own research on this topic, and in public tries to downplay the seriousness of the problem.
For example, in March this year at a hearing in Congress, Mark Zuckerberg said: “The research we have reviewed shows that using social networking applications to connect with other people can have positive effects on mental health.”
When asked by members of Congress to submit these studies to Facebook, they replied that they are proprietary: “Their content is not disclosed in order to promote open and honest dialogue and brainstorming within the company.”
Commenting on the position of Facebook and the manner of the network’s management to respond to comments, Senator Richard Blumenthal said in a letter to the WSJ reporters: “Facebook’s responses are so evasive, they don’t even answer all of our questions. Therefore, the thought really arises that Facebook is hiding something. It looks like Facebook is copying the behavior of the big tobacco companies – targeting teens with its potentially dangerous products, and withholding scientific data in public. “
The algorithm went over to the evil side
In 2018, with signs of a decline in Facebook traffic, Mark Zuckerberg announced a massive change in social media algorithms. The stated goal is to strengthen connections between users, to help them communicate more with friends and family. The implementation method is more widespread dissemination of personal publications rather than professionally produced content.
Mr. Zuckerberg then said that he wants the time people spent on Facebook to be more valuable, and they become closer to each other. In general, to make everyone happy. The result was the opposite.
The new algorithm, in particular, gave priority to publications that users sent to each other over those that were simply liked. Thus, the emphasis was placed on replicating frequently sent content. But not so much cute videos with cats turned out to be popular, but sensational, scandalous and harsh publications.
The more negativity and noise in the post, the more it was shared. As a result, the feeds were filled with “misinformation, toxicity, aggressive content that is overly dominant among frequently sent publications,” according to one of the internal documents.
The professionals quickly grasped this moment. Many political parties and media began to change the balance of the content of their publications from 50/50 negative and positive to 80/20. And such publications were really well dispersed on the social network.
That is, as the WSJ journalists note, instead of becoming kinder and making everyone happy, the news feeds became angrier. The churn of users has only increased.
Facebook has acknowledged the problem. A special team was created that monitors the errors of the algorithm and thinks over how you can effectively reduce them to nothing. The team proposed a number of measures, but, according to the WSJ, Mark Zuckerberg did not approve of some of the proposals.
Implementing the plan in chunks simply didn’t make sense. So in the end, nothing was done.
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