Facebook Knew Calls for Violence Plagued ‘Groups,’ Now Plans Overhaul

[entremet]

Facebook Inc. FB -2.52% in 2019 redesigned its flagship product to center on what it called Groups, forums for like-minded users. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg called them the new "heart of the app."

Now the social-networking giant is clamping down on Groups. The effort began after Facebook's own research found that American Facebook Groups became a vector for the rabid partisanship and even calls for violence that inflamed the country after the election.

The changes, which Facebook escalated after the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, involve overhauling the mechanics of a product that was meant to be central to its future.

Facebook executives were aware for years that tools fueling Groups' rapid growth presented an obstacle to their effort to build healthy online communities, and the company struggled internally over how to contain them.

The company's data scientists had warned Facebook executives in August that what they called blatant misinformation and calls to violence were filling the majority of the platform's top "civic" Groups, according to documents The Wall Street Journal reviewed. Those Groups are generally dedicated to politics and related issues and collectively reach hundreds of millions of users.

The researchers told executives that "enthusiastic calls for violence every day" filled one 58,000-member Group, according to an internal presentation. Another top Group claimed it was set up by fans of Donald Trump but it was actually run by "financially motivated Albanians" directing a million views daily to fake news stories and other provocative content.

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Roughly "70% of the top 100 most active US Civic Groups are considered non-recommendable for issues such as hate, misinfo, bullying and harassment," the presentation concluded. "We need to do something to stop these conversations from happening and growing as quickly as they do," the researchers wrote, suggesting measures to slow the growth of Groups at least long enough to give Facebook staffers time to address violations.

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Facebook's platform-wide rules forbid hate speech and speech that incites violence. The company advises Groups moderators on how to maintain community rules. But rather than helping foster a civil tone, leaders of major politics-focused Groups encouraged members to break Facebook's rules, threatened to ban anyone who reported such content and directed users to post their most outrageous material as comments on other posts—a tactic meant to confuse Facebook's automated moderation systems.

Facebook declined to discuss the specifics of its handling of the researchers' findings.

On October 20, the Mozilla Foundation, which makes the Firefox browser and says it promotes a healthy internet, ran a full-page ad in the Washington Post calling for Facebook to disable its algorithmic Group recommendation systems. "Countless experts—and even some of your own employees—have revealed how these features can amplify disinformation," said the letter., which also urged Twitter Inc. CEO Jack Dorsey to suspend its algorithmically-driven Trending Topics feature.

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Overhaul plans:

Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg publicly cast blame for the riot's organization on smaller social-media platforms, even as the company continued to rein in Groups. The company has dissolved 40 of the top 100 groups listed in the August presentation. She declined to comment.

Beyond the permanent ban on algorithmic civic and health Group recommendations, Facebook will prevent Groups of any sort from being promoted within their first 21 days of existence. Other temporary measures—such as the freezing of comment threads classified as turning vile and daily limits on Group invitations—remain in place and may become permanent.

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Facebook Knew Calls for Violence Plagued ‘Groups,’ Now Plans Overhaul

The social network struggled to balance CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s mantra of free expression against internal findings that misinformation and rabid partisanship had overrun a feature meant to be central to its future.

www.wsj.com

Article is very long and paywalled, but I excerpted the key bits. Jeff Horwitz did a great job.

Facebook and the extremist groups moderators declined to comment.

If you have a WSJ sub, definitely check it out.

 

[WhySoDevious]

Zuck Fuckerberg

 

[Joni]

I think private groups should also have some sort of user limit. Like you can have 10 people in a private group, but anything above 1000 must be completely public or something.

 

[heavy liquid]

mild shock

 

[Arttemis]

Utterly disgusting. Facebook is so fucking greedy, they polarize the world, enable nazis, foster genocide, sell our thousand-data point profiles to whomever, allow foreign nations to commit military grade psy-ops, all in the name of profits... Yet they still exist. Every one is these fiascos should have caused 100% of their advertisers to pull their ads.

Fuck Facebook, and every one who pays them.

Fuck Google and YouTube for having the most dialogical algorithms that hone in on the most vile content, and instead of using that algorithm to seek out and eliminate the propagators of lies and conspiracy theories, they hand them megaphones.

 

[RDreamer]

What gets me is that after 2016 we all knew there was a 'fake news' problem with Facebook and they vowed to fix things. So, they emphasized groups and messed with links in newsfeeds and in doing so just hid the problem and made it so much worse. I mean I never expected Facebook to really fix things 100% but they made the absolute worst possible choices given the issue at hand.

 

[Deleted member 21709]

Why are they so slow to react?

 

[tmarg]

"rabid partisanship"

Still won't call right wing extremists out. Both sides, etc.

 

[Marvie]

Why are they so slow to react?

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$$$$$$$$$

 

[Makoto Yuki]

Fuck Zuck.

 

[Humidex]

Why are they so slow to react?

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b/c a shit ton of the tech bros are right leaning and aren't keen on rocking the boat? The ad revenue helps.

 

[Isro]

They are only doing this now because the new administration and the dem trifecta might actually pass regulations holding them accountable. Nothing more, nothing less.

 

[lunarworks]

They are only doing this now because the new administration and the dem trifecta might actually pass regulations holding them accountable. Nothing more, nothing less.

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It's an uphill battle, because any move they make will be interpreted by the right as "silencing conservative voices".

 

[Slayven]

How many times have they said this and done less then nothing?

 

[Deleted member 46493]

A genocide in Myanmar was planned on Facebook years ago, and nothing changed then. Maybe now that it put white people in danger it'll be different.

 

[Isro]

It's an uphill battle, because any move they make will be interpreted by the right as "silencing conservative voices".

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Assuming the dems still care about what the right thinks - and after the insurrection they can frame it as a platform used to incite and organizing violence. Named the law "The Patriotic Liberty Anti-Terror Act" and it will be fine.

 

[nded]

Facebook and Youtube are fucking mind poison.

 

[UltraGashInferno]

Thank u tuxedo mask

 

[TeenageFBI]

Assuming the dems still care about what the right thinks - and after the insurrection they can frame it as a platform used to incite and organizing violence. Named the law "The Patriotic Liberty Anti-Terror Act" and it will be fine.

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Do what the right does and call it the opposite of what it is. The All Lives Matter Act.

 

[Window]

A genocide in Myanmar was planned on Facebook years ago, and nothing changed then. Maybe now that it put white people in danger it'll be different.

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I was about to say the same thing. The timing of FB admitting some fault for the Capitol riot while there's a coup in Myanmar, where concerns of spread of hate speech on their platform were ignored and contributed to genocide is just too much.

 

[gozu]

So, Mark Zuckerberg is not a good person? And neither is Sheryl Sandberg or whatever her fucking name is?

It's almost as if shitty birds of a feather flock together to then have diarrhea on top of our democracy.

The Social Network movie was too kind to Zuckerberg, if anything, and it's pretty fucking damning.

Pieces of shit can't all of a sudden morph into undigested food. Zuckerberg will never be a good person. And he's going to live until he's 90 years old, and shit on us all the whole time and call it freeze peach.

 

[Weltall Zero]

Researchers warned executives.

Executives looked at profits and sat on their hands.

Water continued to be wet.

 

[Dis]

"We can self regulate! See we are doing it now!" While ignoring it was clear as day go even the normal members of Facebook for years so there's literally no way they didn't know it was that bad with their internal data. Facebook can tell what you've looked at for dinner online but they've spent years acting like they can't fine and remove this shit easily.

This is exactly why self regulation doesn't work, because if Biden and the democrats hadn't won, there would be no fear of regulation on them or any other social media company, so they would happily have continued to allow awful shit to continue if it makes them money. Democrats need to slap real regulations on this shit and make it last.

 

[meowdi gras]

Congrats, Zucknutz. You may not have set out to become one of history's greatest monsters, but you got there regardless. 🖕

 

[VariantX]

Naw, break that company up. I don't really give the slightest fuck what Facebook does at this point. Shit's fucked because of social media companies like them letting it happen because profits driven from engagement. Profits that let them eat more companies and get even bigger continue fanning the flames

If Trump won...

None. Of. This. Would. Even. Be. Happening.