Facebook and Twitter algorithms incentivize 'people to get enraged'

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/facebook-and-twitter-algorithms-incentivize-people-to-get-enraged-walter-isaacson-145710378.html

by garraeth • 5 years ago

218 160 5 years ago

yahoo.com

mmcdermott• 5 years ago

I have two reactions to these kinds of pieces.

The first is to think "of course they are - outrage is the easiest form of engagement and social media is all about easy engagement as that means more eyes to sell."

The second is that there is a delegation of responsibility in these articles. The tone is a "Facebook/Twitter made me act like a jerk." The algorithms may be tuned to surface content that will ruffle your feathers, but the reaction is yours as is the decision to engage with social media at all.

bryanrasmussen2• 5 years ago

ok, so Facebook/Twitter has obviously already decided it is to their benefit that people act like jerks.

So what if they figured out that they could determine who was most likely to be goaded into acting like jerks - like - hey, user 20018 just lost their child, they joined a group for support for people with family members dying of cancer, and their football team lost last night! Start pushing our most highly provocative content at user 20018 stat!

At some point there is a delegation of at least some responsibility - when is that?

Applejinx2• 5 years ago

It looks like they delegate (or have formerly delegated) this type of intention, to paying customers. That of course doesn't mean the userbase: you'd call it 'advertisers' but Facebook got in some trouble over selling off extremely granular access to targeted advertising, to state actors, foreign governments etc: basically whoever's willing to pay enough.

So, if you're trying to create domestic terrorists, it's extremely valuable to be fed information just like your example represents, to sell off access to that demographic.

Facebook doesn't have to consider it 'provocative content', they see it as 'feeding a demographic to a paying customer'. If you're smart enough about your targeting, you can turn it to 'provoke susceptible people into committing acts of terrorism at rates substantially higher than the baseline likelihood of this'. So it's the foreign intelligence agency that is thinking of 'provoking', and Facebook sort of shrugs and fills the order for targeted demographics, without itself thinking much about whether anything is 'provocative'.

iNate2000• 5 years ago

Right. And my reaction has been to mostly stay away from Facebook and Twitter.

But I’m not the one rioting.

zarkov99• 5 years ago

Well, yes, but this isn't a new problem and society long ago decided that sometimes it has to protect people from themselves. We prosecute drug dealers, we punish cigarette manufacturers, we enforce seat belt laws. I think we will be better off when we understand that social media in its current form is much worse than cigarettes, perhaps even, all things considered, worse than drugs.

ramblerman• 5 years ago

I think you are breaking this down into a sociological statement vs one of individual responsibility.

The first is more useful because the system as a whole may have emergent properties. E.g. think of the opioid crisis and the extra profit incentives for doctors, sales reps creating a vicious cycle.

Hence this is also the best place to frame, and fix the problem.

Of course promoting individual responsibility is good, "don't do drugs" but it is usually not enough.

vishnugupta• 5 years ago

Not just the social media but also the print and TV news. At least here in India about 80% of all the news is rage inducing. Because that’s what drives the TRP which in turn means more advertising money.

And then we have artificially induced rage through sports, mostly cricket, where spectators get riled up and vent it out on, where else, Twitter.

nlh• 5 years ago

Social commentary:

As I was scanning HN headlines, I thought this said "engaged" instead of "enraged" :)

But my instinctual reaction was the exactly the same: "Hmm yeah I guess they really are manipulating us - that's the world we live in now I guess."

hjek• 5 years ago

The sad thing is that the difference between the 'g' and the 'r' in this case is genocide:

U.N. human rights experts investigating a possible genocide in Myanmar said on Monday that Facebook had played a role in spreading hate speech there.[0]

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-facebook...

tqi2• 5 years ago

Unlike newspaper front pages and magazine covers? (FWIW I agree that FB/Twitter should take responsibility, but I also think journalists should reflect on their role as well. After all, it's their headlines being ranked...)

flohofwoe3• 5 years ago

Same basic mechanism, but social media is a lot more efficient because (mis-)information travels much faster and reaches more people in shorter time, so you don't get the "cool down effect" of a slower transport medium.

kmeisthax• 5 years ago

This is only partially true: in prior media eras, low-quality journalism was notorious for doing what Facebook and Twitter are now.

We only notice it because we've come out of an almost century long period in which the most effective broadcast mechanism was regulated by the FCC. This is an accident of engineering; the only reason why the FCC was even allowed to what is blatant government censorship is because of the scarcity of radio spectrum. This died the moment cable news networks became widespread. The only restriction on what, say, Fox News, CNN, or MSNBC can publish is their carriage agreement with the cable companies, which usually just dictates genre, not content. Social media is that but laundered across millions of users who "choose" what to share and like out of what platform algorithms recommend.

Prior to television, there was radio, which was also regulated under a similar regime. However, newspapers ruled the roost before that, and they had practically no limits on speech save for extremely weak defamation laws. They also were instrumental in spreading a lot of outright bullshit. "Yellow journalism" is an anagram of "clickbait", after all; and the press were perfectly happy to engage in exactly the same tactics we see today... for pretty much the same reasons. Selling lurid descriptions of political foes and foreign threats makes more money than level-headed explanations of the same controversies.

I'm not sure if either scenario could be described as "good". The FCC effectively engaged in a soft censorship regime through the means of spectrum scarcity. This meant that every information passed through [the five filters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model) of ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak, and (at the time) anti-Communism. On the other hand, it's clearly obvious that a good subset of any group of political ideologues is either incapable of or uninterested in making level-headed assessments about themselves. Self-critique is heresy in the eyes of someone more extreme than you are, and we live in times where the extremes might be right about at least one thing.

at-fates-hands• 5 years ago

Perfect example is the recent Harry/Megan interview with Oprah where social melt down over it. In the interview Megan said she had not talked to her sister in some 10 years and grew up an "only child" and barely knew her. She also said her sister changed her name when she found out she was engaged to Harry. an off handed insult.

The counter story is getting very little press right now, allowing her blatant lies to be spread without any scrutiny. Inside Edition interviewed her sister and her sister brought proof she was lying:

She said: ‘I don’t know how she can say I don’t know her and she was an only child. We’ve got photographs over a lifespan of us together. So how can she not know me?’ The US broadcaster showed four images of Meghan and Samantha together during the clip. Two were from when the duchess was a baby, another from when she was a small child and the last and most recent from Samantha’s graduation, 13 years ago in 2008.

Samantha also disputed Meghan’s claim that she only changed her surname back to Markle after the royal struck up a romance with Harry in 2016. ‘She changed her last name back to Markle… only when I started dating Harry. So I think that says enough,’ Meghan told Oprah. But Samantha hit back: ‘I was a Markle before she was.. Markle has always been my name.’ Samantha then showed Inside Edition her petition to change her name that was dated back to December 1997 and her college diploma, which says Samantha M. Markle.

This is a fairly non-political, pop culture example, but it highlights the fact lies spread so much faster than the truth, that actually finding the truth is nearly impossible. For me, there are no facts anymore, its all about the narrative now. Whoever controls the narrative, controls the "truth".

hnnameblah365• 5 years ago

The enragement alone isn't the concern. Social media can enrage people at a previously unattainable scale and speed, and with less central authority (proxy for trust) than ever before.

Newspapers, magazines, and even TV don't measure up across all these contributing dimensions.

Spivak2• 5 years ago

Yes they do! There isn’t that much difference nowadays between cable news and edgy YT personalities. Old guard media has realized that they can’t compete with social media so they’re borrowing all the plays.

There is news in the newspaper and in the archives of news sites but what’s front and center is outrage bait opinion pieces from large personalities.

balls1872• 5 years ago

This is a key insight.

Tabloid Journalism is known to be sensational and easily dismissed as such because of the medium, and that people in our social circles don't often peddle anything more than the latest celebrity/sports gossip.

Social Media has allowed mis/disinformation to become more credible by both the scale of distribution for that content, and the increasing that contents trustworthiness by highlighting engagement from people in our social circles.

AnimalMuppet• 5 years ago

Social media also enrages at a much deeper level.

Say a newspaper printed something. You read it. You got angry. You wrote a letter to the editor and mailed it. Maybe a week later, they printed your letter. A few days later, someone you know saw your letter and commented to you that they thought you were right.

You see something on Facebook. You got angry. You wrote something in reply (perhaps with less thought than the letter to the editor, because it wasn't a once-every-few-years event). Five minutes later, likes comments start pouring in. Not just one person tells you they think you were right; ten people do. And they tell you in the next few minutes and hours, not days later. And they comment on each others' comments about your post.

You get massively more positive reinforcement for your outrage now than you did with newspapers. The outrage gets reinforced, socially ratified. You get praised for it.

It's not just that Facebook hands you more things to be outraged about (not all of them true). It's that the outrage takes much deeper hold in you, because it's reinforced so much.

minikites2• 5 years ago

The difference is that Twitter and Facebook "launder" sources by putting their banner at the top. A sensationalist newspaper piece is typically grounded in some reality, but it appears in your "feed" right next to completely unmoored conspiracy theories from your loonier aunts and uncles. To a passive consumer it all blends together. Even for the active consumer, most them don't have enough information literacy skills to tell the difference or critically examine sources.

rich_sasha• 5 years ago

This was apparently a recognised KGB propaganda method abroad. Sponsor semi-respectable news sources, and have them quote arbitrarily unreliable articles from elsewhere. Literally information laundering.

I read about it somewhere in an article about ZeroHedge practices, I can't quite find a link now.

EDIT: link: https://streetwiseprofessor.com/how-do-you-know-that-zero-he...

Viliam1234• 5 years ago

Yeah. Newspapers after some time develop reputation. So you buy X, but you wouldn't touch Y, no matter the headline.

Then "social media" take a bit of this and a bit of that, and put it all next to each other.

Spivak2• 5 years ago

Everyone should reflect on this role. All media that’s even vaguely political is taking plays out of the abusive relationship playbook of comforting people by validating their fears and turning their anxiety into anger. All because people keep coming back if their only place to feel safe is your outlet which makes them even more angry.

All this stupidity because we don’t have a metric for successful journalism other than engagement. “Things are good” doesn’t get clicks.

ClumsyPilot• 5 years ago

A murderer and a surgeon both cut people open. Clearly the implications are different

Cthulhu_2• 5 years ago

The difference is that you can't reply to, report, or dogpile a newspaper as much. The outrage on social media is a result from various factions going for each other.

burlesona• 5 years ago

Of course traditional news has the same problem. “If it bleeds, it leads!”

But newspapers are liable for the content they publish, and that keeps misinformation somewhat in check.

If Twitter and Facebook etc were held to publisher standards they couldn’t exist in any form like they do today. I kind of think that would be a good thing.

pjc508• 5 years ago

People say this a lot, and forget that (a) libel is pretty limited in the US and (b) expensive everywhere and (c) despite being much heavier in the UK still does not restrain our awful press from campaigns of harassment against celebrities they deem appropriate targets for malicious gossip.

solosoyokaze5• 5 years ago

I would say The New York Times falsely claiming that Iraq had WMD and helping to champion the Iraq war was far more damaging than anything that has happened on social media.

The MSM may steer clear of the obvious falsehoods like vaportrails/5g mind control, but the misinformation they do provide is extra dangerous, especially when it's a joint effort with the government.

ForHackernews2• 5 years ago

“If it bleeds, it leads!”

This slogan refers to sensational violence (car crashes, murders, earthquakes), not content that inflames readers ideologically. Maybe it's tawdry in its own way, but it does not seem nearly so polarizing to me.

tqi2• 5 years ago

I actually don't think the libelous stuff is what is driving most of the polarization, but rather its the rage-generating content like the "war on christmas". And it's not just news sources on the right, this recent NYT article is clearly not national news worthy, except to drive engagement / enragement (just look at the URL they chose): https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/08/us/stewart-allen-clark-pa...

pjc508• 5 years ago

Both/and. It's a feedback loop, as well; the press are in it for the shares.

Anyone with the slightest exposure to UK news media will have been confronted with this very recently; the Oprah interview with Harry and Meghan alleging the press campaign against them, subsequent back-and-forth, and finally Piers Morgan getting himself sacked for storming off his own TV show after being contradicted by his own weatherman.

The latter event is both pure old-media failure and an example of the kind of sheer derangement that being a participant in the culture wars can induce in people. At least he wasn't storming the government.

Rule357• 5 years ago

Ehh. He's either in the culture war, or he believes what he says. If you're a Brit you probably see the royal family fairly positively. (Many brits don't like them as people, but think they're handling the transfer of power well, etc.)

His factual correctness and his sincerity are two different things. Who knows what MM is, at heart, but if he has reason to see her negatively why shouldn't he lament her influence over his country?

Is there a time-limit, where you're only allowed to criticize someone for 5y, and so when it hit 6 his opinion was officially stale?

alexfromapex• 5 years ago

I think there is a presupposition that being enraged is always bad. If the government is not working and all online dissent is oppressed by algorithms no one will be able to effect change and then you will have an enragement bubble so to speak. That bubble bursting will be much worse than people simply being enraged and voicing their concerns.

flohofwoe3• 5 years ago

Did you miss the genocide in Myanmar? That doesn't look much like "people voicing their concern":

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46105934

SpicyLemonZest3• 5 years ago

I'm not aware of any information suggesting that Facebook's engagement algorithms specifically were responsible for this. The criticisms in this article are about how Facebook needs to ban certain categories of violent content, not simply tweak the newsfeed to deprioritize them.

pjc508• 5 years ago

As I've said before, the question is whether they're real concerns. The concerns of, say, Belarus citizens protesting against their government seem pretty real. The concerns of people spreading rumours against ethnic minority groups in Myanmar and other places are based in falsehood. As were the Qanon crowd.

magiiique• 5 years ago

It's an interesting one.

The objective function for serving content surely isn't literally to get people angry, rather to "promote engagement" or whatever, which turns out to be the same thing.

Can you ban a company from trying to optimise its key metrics? No. So what do you do? If the enraging content is there anyway, what's wrong with pointing people to it? If you're allowed to sell dynamite to the public in your shop, why not point angry customers to it?

To me the whole model is broken, and picking individual bits of it that aren't is not the constructive approach.

dangerboysteve• 5 years ago

prof Scott Galloway has been screaming about this for some time on his Pivot podcast with Kara Swisher.

mslate• 5 years ago

The irony is palpable

humanlion87• 5 years ago

I would also include Reddit in this list. The homepage (if you visit incognito or not being signed in) seems to be tailored to bubble up all the "outrageous" events.

solosoyokaze5• 5 years ago

I find the behavior of moderators on Reddit far more enraging than any content that gets boiled up. It's like the mods of /r/politics and other similar default subs are there to cause political friction and rage by being openly and aggressively partisan to a very particular slice of the political spectrum. I say this as someone well to the left of the zeitgeist on those subs, but you'll of course hear the same thing from people to the right of them.

BitwiseFool4• 5 years ago

Don't forget about the dozens of powermods who enable other subreddits to transform into political echo chambers. A great example is r/InsanePeopleFacebook turning into a showcase of Donald Trump and Tomi Lahren tweets.

spaaz• 5 years ago

Try /r/stupidpol, that's good for political discussion from all sides - though it's a Marxist sub, it welcomes discussion and debate from other points of view.

dgellow2• 5 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised at all if mods of popular subreddit were actually paid for doing this, looking at r/all or r/popular always feels like an astroturfing operation.

Rule357• 5 years ago

It's quite common. Moderation is a bit of a thankless job so help is always welcome and in a power-grab honesty and hard-work become negatives, trumped by the ability to lie shamelessly and ceaselessly.

Many women's subreddits, especially if they're for lesbians, are entirely moderated by men. The ones that weren't were slandered off of Reddit.

gundmc• 5 years ago

It baffles me how reddit tends to evade the press coverage and discussions for as large and influential it is.

hemloc_io• 5 years ago

A reasonable explanation might be that the ppl who write these articles don't use it lol, as well as the people in congress who write regulations they report on.

They use Twitter and their parents use Facebook. Any article I've seen on reddit treats it as closer to 4chan than Twitter.

peruvian• 5 years ago

Reminds me how some forums aren't allowed to have apps in the App Store due to porn, as well as the Tumblr porn controversy. Reddit has more porn and NSFW content than almost anywhere else.

ndiscussion• 5 years ago

Reddit is owned by Advanced Publications, a media company.

Facebook and Google are sucking all the profits from old media - Reddit is their hedge against that. Of course they don't complain.

ForHackernews2• 5 years ago

Reddit doesn't make any money. Nobody wants to advertise to that user base, hence the endless redesigns.

fullshark• 5 years ago

R/The_Donald got a ton of press coverage and discussion to the point where it was shut down, whereas the left leaning ragebait subs do not. Why is this do you think? Why do you think facebook gets so much press attention?

grawprog2• 5 years ago

Possibly because reddit's owned by Advance Publications...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications

A company that owns a fair amount of media outlets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Advance_subsidiaries

Why would they report anything bad about themselves?

wott• 5 years ago

On Reddit:

1. Many posts & comments are still longer than 3 half-lines, which is the upper limit of what a journalist can read (journalists like the 'journalists' who spend their time looking for something juicy on Twitter/FB).

2. Famous, bankable, known people are less identifiable.

local_dev• 5 years ago

It could also be due to how awful the new user experience is on Reddit. A journalist would be instantly turned off to using it as a source.

If you haven't seen it in a while, using a new browser or incognito mode, view reddit without logging in. It is an absolutely awful experience. The content you see as a new user is basically all memes and you are blasted with trending content on top of the card based feed.

SketchySeaBeast• 5 years ago

That's another argument for curating your own list - my list today seems to be overly full of that weird ML lip-syncing app, which while fully uncanny valley, isn't enraging.

SpicyLemonZest3• 5 years ago

It is, and I encourage everyone to do that, but I don't think it's a systemic solution. After all, Facebook and Twitter offer ways to curate your feed too.

BitwiseFool4• 5 years ago

The same aggravation and agitation happens in regional subreddits as well. r/Texas has been transformed into a hatefest against Ted Cruz and Republicans after the recent snowstorm. You'll find wild hyperbole about the Texas GOP killing people, Facebook quality memes about how terrible the state is, and incessant cheerleading for AOC and out of state progressives.

badRNG• 5 years ago

There's a difference between an algorithm maximizing engagement even if it means pushing you to read outrage articles and folks on a subreddit saying negative things about politicians you like.

hellbanTHIS3• 5 years ago

I kind of disagree, Reddit has its own problems (nation states run by warlords) but the downvote button and anonymity solves some of the “outrage for likes” stuff that plagues Twitter and Facebook. I haven’t seen the frontpage you’re talking about in years and I doubt many users do.

I really don’t know why FB and Twitter don’t add an anonymous “dislike” feature. Maybe they tried it and it caused other problems, who knows. More likely though they see that outrage increases engagement even if the toxic environment chases people away eventually.

refraincomment• 5 years ago

Reddit is the only social media that falls so low as to regularly display lynchings and beatings on the front page. "JusticeServed", and other cheap justifications for violence. Reddit and Twitter the biggest dumps of the internet.

bpodgursky• 5 years ago

"dislike" buttons can be extremely powerful tools for enforcing groupthink.

I think you downplay how much this affects reddit. Hot-topic issues shift from 55/45 popularity splits (where the minority view is present, but usually overshadowed) to 10/0 when you net out up and downvotes. It gives a sense of single-mindedness in a community where the majority view in truth only barely edges out the others.

mdoms• 5 years ago

I haven’t seen the frontpage you’re talking about in years and I doubt many users do.

It's the default page for anyone who isn't logged in (most likely a majority of users, or at least a large fraction). And I'd be willing to bet at least half of logged in users only have the default subs.

Tronno• 5 years ago

This might be true on more civilized "niche" communities, but the split on the default front page is roughly 50/40/10% ragebait/meme/substantive content, and I use the word "substantive" very generously.

mfer• 5 years ago

Their goal is engagement and outrage seems to feed engagement.

More eyes at all costs has a price. It's not just money.

asats• 5 years ago

It's absurd. I blocked all the outrage/whining filled subreddits in RES and now if I visit r/all/top for a month only 9 out of the first 250 posts are visible, everything else falls under that outrage/whining filter.

tims33• 5 years ago

The social media platforms prefer to call it engagement. They never hid this fact and somehow it didn't bother their user base as much as it should have.

Zhyl• 5 years ago

Engagement started as 'we want to make our party as good as possible so that you want to come and bring all your friends' and ended up being Kathy Bates in Misery.

rvz• 5 years ago

Obviously. Public gossip, rumours, hype and outrage sells and gives more eye balls and clicks.

flyingfences2• 5 years ago

There was a good article [0] in The Atlantic yesterday linking this centralized algorithmic vitriol to the decline of democracy in America. The article also suggests some techno-legal fixes that I'm leery of, but I think its diagnosis of the issue is spot-on.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/the-int... (paywalled)

azangru• 5 years ago

What does a "decline of democracy", especially if applied to the US, mean?

(Yes, I've skimmed the article; still don't understand.)

flyingfences2• 5 years ago

In short, Tocqueville's notion was that democracy works in America (in contrast to the 1st Republic) because we Americans handle almost everything at as local a level as possible and are willing to get along and work together to do what needs to be done; social media outrage has brought local matters to the national scope and has made us uncompromising enemies, rather than allies, of our neighbors, which has crippled our ability to productively and effectively deal with governmental and political matters. I.E., the article regards a decline in the efficacy of democracy in America rather than a decline in the practice of democracy in America.

Cthulhu_2• 5 years ago

Definitely. They allowed Trump's posts because it got people enraged, every tweet causing a storm of tweets from all camps, all going after each other and trying to 'debate', but in the end it became a meaningless cauldron of activity with a net effect of zero...

...for the participants anyway, for Twitter, any engagement, any activity, any pair of eyes on their service translates to money, both directly (ad impressions) and indirectly (engagement correlates with stock price). In the past year - less Trump, more Covidiots - Twitter's stock price has doubled.

blululu2• 5 years ago

I do wish that we had more solid research to back this claim. As it stands the claim that people are incentivized to be enraged is a single person’s opinion that resonate with people’s current beliefs. There are a number of other trends going on at a macro level and it seems like this one is an obvious culprit but nobody is doing the work to collect and analyze the data to back this up.

hnxs2• 5 years ago

Why would anyone fund said research?

blululu2• 5 years ago

Universities. The incentives are well aligned and there are plenty of labs doing research in this space.

ryanmarsh• 5 years ago

The word I use for this in casual conversation (not claiming credit for) is "aggro porn". I read once that anger is a powerful (useful) reward circuit in the brain, the problem is it increases stress hormones which have deleterious effects over time.

I'm sure it's intentional but I presume it's also somewhat inevitable that platforms with user generated and user amplified content will represent the reward circuits of the brain. Which, at 30,000 ft. makes it obvious which circuits Instagram, Tiktok, Reddit, et.al., even Hacker News are triggering.

ffggvv• 5 years ago

i think they’re tailored to optimize for clicks. and the users themselves are the ones the click these enraging stories and therefore train the ml algorithms to show more of that

ceejayoz• 5 years ago

Of course, so do articles about the algorithms.

It's turtles all the way down.

kaiju0• 5 years ago

I think this falls in line with the quip of ask a question and get crickets. Make an incorrect statement as fact and it will piss someone off enough to give you the answer to your initial question. All engagement metrics are based on actions and time. The long detailed answer and spewing vitriol increase both.

arshbot• 5 years ago

Ironic that this post wants us to be concerned about other platforms optimizing posts that make their users concerned

akudha• 5 years ago

Nobody is forcing us to read the news, participate in social media etc. We can pick and choose what news to consume and from where (yeah, most news sites are crap, I get that).

There is no way these sites are gonna police themselves and there is no way for us to expect the govt to control them. There is just too much ad money and too much access to data, they are not going to give that up. But there is an easy solution to this. Just refuse to participate and consume only the absolute bare minimum news, social media etc.

Social media is not email or SMS, they are not necessary for daily life. One can easily live without Facebook/Twitter/Instagram etc (and many do), unlike say GMail.

swiley• 5 years ago

Youtube at least started forcing news on everyone last year. It was really obvious for me since I never watched news on youtube. There would be two or three rows of normal stuff and then a "covid/politics" row full of CNN/CNBC/BBC/whatever saying the world is ending.

I've solved the problem personally by blocking youtube and now I have more time for my girlfriend and side projects.

temp8964• 5 years ago

Jack Dorsey donated $10 Million to the Antiracist Research Center. It makes me feel he made an outrage machine which outraged himself.

cronix• 5 years ago

Zuckerberg donated $300 million to "protect American elections."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/mark-zuckerbergs-d...

im3w1l• 5 years ago

Aren't antiracists a big part of the outrage dynamics though? Take this research center, I assume they spend time and money research how everything is you like is actually terrible and reasons for you to be outraged.

nayuki• 5 years ago

CGP Grey made a great video on the self-perpetuating cycle of outrage back in 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

collyw• 5 years ago

You should try a 4chan /pol "you rage you loose" thread.

combatentropy• 5 years ago

The article is pretty light on how these platforms do so.

Do they not simply bubble up popular posts: ones with likes, retweets, and comments? That might mean a politicized post, but it also could be a positive one about the kindness of a stranger or some cute picture of your kids.

These platforms may well be incentivizing enraging posts. I just don't know how they're doing it, and this article did not help me understand it.

ISL• 5 years ago

I have often felt that if everyone were rate-limited to two or three upvotes/likes per day, the world might be a more-meaningful place.

loveistheanswer4• 5 years ago

Hate spreads virally on social media.

Perhaps we need some "social distancing measures" such as thise you suggested to "slow the spread" of hatred on social media.

strict9• 5 years ago

One simple thing twitter can do to reduce enraging behavior and harassment:

De-prioritize "reply guys" that always reply to a a popular account with an incendiary comment.

They get a ton of comments and few likes/RTs (ratio'd) yet reply guys are usually the top response to a popular tweet.

Seriously twitter, why set reply guys as the top response to every tweet? It encourages hostility, and this is but one example.

Rule357• 5 years ago

Because they're what everyone wants - the counterpoint. They get ratioed because they aren't preaching to the choir.

You know what posts don't have them? Ones that don't offer them anything. It's generally incendiary posts that are picked apart, and that's because they're easy and worthwhile. They have an audience that would otherwise avoid the message.

BikiniPrince• 5 years ago

I solved this issue by removing people on fb who post political messages. It is surprising how tame, relaxing and good natured my fees is. Good luck trying to foster some inflammatory thread.

loveistheanswer4• 5 years ago

What percentage of your social network did you have to block to achieve that?

annoyingnoob• 5 years ago

I always thought Techdirt should be called Daily Outrage. When its all about eyeballs on pages of course things that draw attention will be prioritized.

atum47• 5 years ago

I made sure to follow people who post nice content about games, indie games, algorithms, aí, ml, pixel art, 3d stuff... And even though twitter keep finding ways of showing me what f** Bolsonaro did or what was the latest news on Big Brother. I deleted my account and never looked back. Same with Facebook.

khawkins• 5 years ago

People are getting increasingly enraged because there is a palpable culture shift happening in the western world, creating a giant rift in fundamental principles, societal perspectives, and interpretation of current events. When we can't agree on any of these things, the other side seems radical and unhinged when interpreted through our own set of values/principles.

The "enrage machine" is simply a product of this phenomenon. Sure, you can try and reduce the rage by censoring and banning minority views off the platform, but the underlying problem is still there. The angry division is still there, whether you're hearing it on social media, cable news, talk radio, or Thanksgiving dinner.

zitterbewegung• 5 years ago

100 years ago we would have called this yellow journalism.

If you want to make a system that is solely on getting eyeballs to look at advertisements the best way to do that is controversy. If you really understand social media how to get an advertisement for free on CNN is to say something controversial enough on Twitter that CNN will show a story of it. What we are witnessing is the disruption of original sources of information (TV / Newspapers / Magazines) into a more algorithmic system. A bunch of people do things like "blame the algorithm" but instead you have to consider that it is a cybernetic system with both artificial agents and people interacting with each other and the accountability doesn't disappear at the part of the algorithm the accountability is with the organizations that deploy it.

lordloki• 5 years ago

We should still call it yellow journalism. The fact that reporters at large media companies will search for outrage on Facebook and Twitter in order to get more hits is a failure of modern journalism. Reporters basing so much of their time on social media skews their objectivity just as much as it would anyone else. It's basically become a feedback loop of anger and it's not contained to twitter and facebook any longer.

koonsolo2• 5 years ago

Social media is entertainment. News is entertainment.

If you want to get informed, read a book written by an expert or someone with real life experience.

balozi• 5 years ago

If you are going to claim that people are incentivized to do something, you had better state what those incentives are. Are there editors left at Yahoo?

loveistheanswer4• 5 years ago

Is it not implicitly obvious that money is the incentive?

pkamb• 5 years ago

I hate on Twitter that the `What's Happening` info box loads a half second before your feed. I'm sure that's a deliberate "growth hack" for the outrage machine.

I should figure out how to block elements like that, which of course in the current internet landscape have completely randomized DIV class names.

hntrader2• 5 years ago

how to block elements like that

TweetDeck

alteria• 5 years ago

You should be able to block those elements with uBlockOrigin or similar browser extensions. I blocked a bunch of the "trending" stuff since it never really contributed positively to my site experience.

rib3ye• 5 years ago

How is this different than traditional news headline construction, other than it being done manually?

Tycho• 5 years ago

This story is on Yahoo!, which serves numerous stories on its homepage from outrage rags like HuffPost, TheDailyBeast, The Independent, and The Guardian. And, what's more, doesn't allow users to customize their feed by filtering out such sources. They do seem to have a button to 'show less from' sources, but it doesn't seem to work, and doesn't offer to remove them completely. Is this just shoddy product engineering? I'm not sure, I suspect that they know that people will click low quality outrage stories in spite of themselves - you can't resist the temptation to click them when you see them, which is a big part of the reason why I would rather not see them in the first place.

gdsdfe• 5 years ago

Let's not forget YouTube in this

thoughtstheseus• 5 years ago

I’m going to take a moment to plug The Congressional Research Service. They produce reports on every topical issue. Free, readable, and timely. Stop reading the news/social media and get informed (by a variety of higher quality sources).

brutal_chaos_• 5 years ago

Enraged is an easy form of engagement. Perhaps rage is the junk food of emotions...

Facebook and Twitter algorithms incentivize 'people to get enraged'

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