This week, the Wall Street Journal reported a change in Facebook's algorithm that has been circulating since 2018 and "rewarded anger," according to internal Facebook notes.
But the Wall Street Journal also reported that the memoirs showed "that CEO Mark Zuckerberg resisted the proposed fixes" and that the internal notes "offer a glimpse of how much Facebook knows about the flaws in its platform and how often it does not want to fix them." ”
In the fall of 2018, Jonah Peretti, CEO of istoσελίδαs BuzzFeed, sent an email to a top executive at Facebook Inc.
The email stated in a nutshell that the more divisive content publishers posted the more viral it became on the Facebook platform, creating an incentive to produce more content of a similar nature.
Mr Peretti blamed a major Facebook update on his News Feed algorithm the 2018 to boost "substantial social interactions," or MSI (from meaningful social interactions), between friends and relatives, according to internal Facebook notes searched by the Wall Street Journal.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the time that the goal of changing the algorithm was to strengthen links between users and improve their experience.
Facebook with the new algorithm would encourage its members to interact more with their friends and family and spend less time passively on other content, which according to a research was harmful to their mental health.
Within the company, however, officials warned that the change had the opposite effect, according to documents held by the WSJ.
Ο algorithm made the Facebook platform a very angry place. The company's researchers found that publishers and political parties were retargeting their posts to news outlets with angry content.
This tactic produced high levels of comments and reactions that naturally translate into success on Facebook.
"Our approach has had unhealthy side effects on important pieces of public content, such as politics and the news," wrote a group of data scientists, referring to Mr Peretti's complaints.
The scientists concluded that the algorithm for the News Feed made the angry posts much more visible.
"OR misinformation, toxicity and violent content are all too prevalent," the researchers said in internal memos.
Mr Mark Zuckerberg resisted some of the proposed fixes, the documents show, as he worried they could harm the company's other goal – to make users engage more with Facebook.