It’s been four months now since Facebook announced its intention to invest more heavily in private groups and messaging, and recently that effort has gotten a major marketing push. Walk through the Montgomery BART station in San Francisco and you’ll see ads for Facebook Groups plastering every wall, each emblazoned with the anodyne slogan “more together.â€
In years past, such a launch might have been greeted with a collective shrug from the press. (The launch of Facebook Live in 2016 also involved a takeover of Montgomery Station, and passed with little fanfare â€" at least until a rash of violent live streams drew their attention.) But the increased focus on groups this year has come with energetic scrutiny from journalists â€" a sign of how even seemingly mundane Facebook launches now meet with deep skepticism around the world.
And judging from the awful groups that journalists keep discovering, that skepticism is warranted. Last week, ProPublica found a group of Border Patrol agents joking about migrant deaths and making other racist and offensive comments. (The Intercept posted an archive of the group’s awful posts.) Over the weekend, CNN found another:
The same day, Le Monde found a group with 56,000 members devoted largely to making misogynist comments. (I’m relying on Google Translate here, so let me know if I get this wrong, French speakers.) The group actively solicited revenge porn before Facebook shut it down, according to the report.
And just today, a Twitter user who stumbled across a Facebook TV ad investigated one of the featured groups, and found a rash of ugly posts.
Facebook Groups offer us yet another chance to think about the difference between internet problems and platform problems. There have always been online forums where awful people congregate â€" that’s an internet problem. It’s plausible that, in the absence of Facebook Groups, racist Border Patrol agents would have found another place to hang out online and spout bigotry.
But Facebook’s size and recommendation algorithms change that calculation. Its size enables connections between many Border Patrol agents who may not otherwise have met. And its recommendation algorithms work to introduce them to each other â€" just as new moms were introduced to anti-vaccine groups through recommendations, so are Border Patrol agents introduced to groups like Real CBP Nation.
These algorithms operate opaquely, and their recommendations can rarely be predicted in advance. No one knew Facebook would recommend that new moms join anti-vax groups â€" its algorithm just suggested that they join, and found that new moms acted on the suggestion, and so started suggesting it more.
Facebook can’t solve racism or misogyny. But it can examine more closely the way it unwittingly recruits allies for racists and misogynists. That’s a platform problem through and through â€" and in the early days of Facebook’s pivot to privacy, it doesn’t seem to be getting much better.
https://adstoppipro.com/blog/the-ugly-side-of-facebooks-pivot-to-privacy-is-starting-to-show
More blog here
In years past, such a launch might have been greeted with a collective shrug from the press. (The launch of Facebook Live in 2016 also involved a takeover of Montgomery Station, and passed with little fanfare â€" at least until a rash of violent live streams drew their attention.) But the increased focus on groups this year has come with energetic scrutiny from journalists â€" a sign of how even seemingly mundane Facebook launches now meet with deep skepticism around the world.
And judging from the awful groups that journalists keep discovering, that skepticism is warranted. Last week, ProPublica found a group of Border Patrol agents joking about migrant deaths and making other racist and offensive comments. (The Intercept posted an archive of the group’s awful posts.) Over the weekend, CNN found another:
The same day, Le Monde found a group with 56,000 members devoted largely to making misogynist comments. (I’m relying on Google Translate here, so let me know if I get this wrong, French speakers.) The group actively solicited revenge porn before Facebook shut it down, according to the report.
And just today, a Twitter user who stumbled across a Facebook TV ad investigated one of the featured groups, and found a rash of ugly posts.
Facebook Groups offer us yet another chance to think about the difference between internet problems and platform problems. There have always been online forums where awful people congregate â€" that’s an internet problem. It’s plausible that, in the absence of Facebook Groups, racist Border Patrol agents would have found another place to hang out online and spout bigotry.
But Facebook’s size and recommendation algorithms change that calculation. Its size enables connections between many Border Patrol agents who may not otherwise have met. And its recommendation algorithms work to introduce them to each other â€" just as new moms were introduced to anti-vaccine groups through recommendations, so are Border Patrol agents introduced to groups like Real CBP Nation.
These algorithms operate opaquely, and their recommendations can rarely be predicted in advance. No one knew Facebook would recommend that new moms join anti-vax groups â€" its algorithm just suggested that they join, and found that new moms acted on the suggestion, and so started suggesting it more.
Facebook can’t solve racism or misogyny. But it can examine more closely the way it unwittingly recruits allies for racists and misogynists. That’s a platform problem through and through â€" and in the early days of Facebook’s pivot to privacy, it doesn’t seem to be getting much better.
https://adstoppipro.com/blog/the-ugly-side-of-facebooks-pivot-to-privacy-is-starting-to-show
More blog here
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