Day 5. Ok, this one in the Facebook Files touches a sensitive area for me. Content moderation. It’s not as clear cut as the egregiousness of whitelisting a global celebrity athlete’s revenge porn (Day 1) but let’s get it into. /1
Yes, anti-vax opinions are problematic and when it’s disinfo it’s killing people. Rather than have Facebook pushing towards a binary debate on take-down / leave-up (aka censoring), we prefer to look at the core platform and how it provides velocity and reach to toxic sludge. /2
That said, there is enough in today’s WSJ report to make it clear that even assisting in a global pandemic is driven by PR and policy interests. Facebook is playing catch-up because of external pressures. If Trump was in the White House, their priorities would be different. /3
That’s why Will Oremus’s piece in Wash Post yesterday on organizational structure and Comms/policy involvement in decisions (different than Twitter org) is also problematic for Facebook. Get Kaplan, Bickert, etc out. It’s worth looking it up, I’ll post at end with my links. /4
Anyway, back to WSJ piece. We know the core platform is the problem. Its reliance on maximizing a funding model (microtargeted advertising and engagement) dependent on user data, engagement and microtargeting around non-advertising posts to create advertising inventory. Toxic. /5
More resources available than most nations’s GDP and nearly 40% of Romania’s yet 👀 . /6 
Let’s be clear here. This is UNICEF having to buy advertising from Facebook in order to offset antivax comments on their pages. Advertisers and publishers have dealt with this but it’s horrific when you think of the millions of people dead globally. /7
OK, I’m getting a bit outraged here. Rather than sell advertising to UNICEF to offset antivax trolling, Facebook could have done this much earlier ⬇️ It isn’t “breaking glass” as they call it. It’s &;@$ing information architecture, common sense and human decency over profits. /8
Someone on Facebook’s team didn’t revolt when they decided to leave the maximum comments at 300 PER HOUR PER PERSON on authoritative health source pages. For how long? Why weren’t these tactics in place before the pandemic? /9
This isn’t “break the glass”… this is exactly what should be done. Back to my first point, censorship is not something we should be comfortable advocating but for clearly harmful content Facebook’s systems can and should avoid accelerating and driving insertion into feeds. /10
Here is the WSJ report for today. Day 5. /11 wsj.com/articles/faceb…
And here is the Post piece I reference above by @WillOremus that gets into why the organizational design and leadership are problematic and create unhealthy friction in balancing profits and ethics. /12 washingtonpost.com/technology/202…
And here is a link to Day 4 in case you missed it (links to day 1-3 at bottom). The message to CMOs is only louder. They all read the WSJ.
https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1438571130512621572?s=21
Let me add a few items here in light of today’s WSJ report on Facebook. This is from a recent Parliamentary hearing, “does Facebook control what is my newsfeed through your algorithms?” “Uh, no sir.”
https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1371542054749224960
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