Facebook Has a Superuser-Supremacy Problem

[Introversion]

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/02/facebook-hate-speech-misinformation-superusers/621617/

If you want to understand why Facebook too often is a cesspool of hate and disinformation, a good place to start is with users such as John, Michelle, and Calvin.

John, a caps-lock devotee from upstate New York, calls House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “PIGLOSI,” uses the term negro, and says that the right response to Democrats with whom they disagree is to “SHOOT all of them.” Michelle rails against the “plandemic.” Calvin uses gay as a slur and declares that Black neighborhoods are always “SHITHOLES.” You’ve almost certainly encountered people like these on the internet. What you may not realize, though, is just how powerful they are.

For more than a year, we’ve been analyzing a massive new data set that we designed to study public behavior on the 500 U.S. Facebook pages that get the most engagement from users. Our research, part of which will be submitted for peer review later this year, aims to better understand the people who spread hate and misinformation on Facebook. We hoped to learn how they use the platform and, crucially, how Facebook responds. Based on prior reporting, we expected it would be ugly. What we found was much worse.

Read: Facebook is a Doomsday Machine

The most alarming aspect of our findings is that people like John, Michelle, and Calvin aren’t merely fringe trolls, or a distraction from what really matters on the platform. They are part of an elite, previously unreported class of users that produce more likes, shares, reactions, comments, and posts than 99 percent of Facebook users in America.

They’re superusers. And because Facebook’s algorithm rewards engagement, these superusers have enormous influence over which posts are seen first in other users’ feeds, and which are never seen at all. Even more shocking is just how nasty most of these hyper-influential users are. The most abusive people on Facebook, it turns out, are given the most power to shape what Facebook is.

 

[Just Jeremy]

I recently removed myself from Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and don't miss the masquerade one bit.

 

[Introversion]

I’m told by people I trust that Twitter makes it easier than Facebook to screen out content you don’t want to see. (I don’t Twitter.)

Facebook is clearly being used by bad-faith actors to propagate disinformation.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/26/facebook-disinformation-russia-report/

Facebook's algorithms fueled massive foreign propaganda campaigns during the 2020 election – here's how algorithms can manipulate you

You have evolved to tap into the wisdom of the crowds. But on social media your cognitive biases can lead you astray, something organized disinformation campaigns count on.

theconversation.com

Facebook Finds New Disinformation Campaigns and Braces for 2020 Torrent (Published 2019)

The company also announced several new steps to reduce the spread of false information, including an effort to label posts from state-sponsored media.

www.nytimes.com

That’s not even counting people who genuinely believe the hateful propaganda they spout, and there seem to be quite a few of those.

I stepped away from Facebook in early 2020, because I was tired of the tide of baloney being spread around about COVID-19, and the upcoming election too. It’s probably possible to very selectively use FB for friends & family contacts, but I just increasingly found it unpleasant to ignore the ads and “news” on my timeline, not to mention how polarized and unpleasant the interactions with high school classmates had become.

FB seems a net bad for humanity. For peaceful democracy, anyway. Since we can’t vote it out of office, my only choice was to avoid it.

 

[Meg]

I highly recommend Social Fixer for FB. It gives you lots of control that FB doesn't want you to have. I never get ads or "news," plus I get to see posts in strictly chronological order. (Of course, this doesn't address the larger concern of what FB is doing to our society.)

 

[Introversion]

Of course, this doesn't address the larger concern of what FB is doing to our society.

Yeah, that’s the part I struggle with. Plugins like Social Fixer are a help, but in the large, most of FB’s users are getting the default experience, which is awful in multiple ways. I guess I personally reached the point of just not wanting to be on the platform at all.

 

[MaeZe]

The disinformation dozen:

https://252f2edd-1c8b-49f5-9bb2-cb57bb47e4ba.filesusr.com/ugd/f4d9b9_b7cedc0553604720b7137f8663366ee5.pdf

Living in full view of the public on the internet are a small group of individuals who do not have relevant medical expertise and have their own pockets to line, who are abusing social media platforms to misrepresent the threat of Covid and spread misinformation about the safety of vaccines. According to our recent report, anti-vaccine activists on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter reach more than 59 million followers, making these the largest and most important social media platforms for anti-vaxxers.4 Our research has also found anti-vaxxers using social media platforms to target Black Americans, exploiting higher rates of vaccine hesitancy in that community to spread conspiracies and lies about the safety of Covid vaccines.

2. Analysis of a sample of anti-vaccine content that was shared or posted on Facebook and Twitter a total of 812,000 times between 1 February and 16 March 2021 shows that 65 percent of anti-vaccine content is attributable to the Disinformation Dozen.

3. Despite repeatedly violating Facebook, Instagram and Twitter’s terms of service agreements, nine of the Disinformation Dozen remain on all three platforms, while just three have been comprehensively removed from just one platform.

It's very disheartening.