Lots Of Big Media Companies Had Access To The Facebook Files; Only Gizmodo Decided To Put In The Work To Make Them Public

from the good-for-them dept

Over the last month or so, you've probably heard a lot about the Facebook Files or the Facebook Papers, which are the documents shared by former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen with the media, starting with the Wall Street Journal, and then a rather reluctant "consortium" of seventeen big name US-based news organizations. The reluctance was apparent in the name of the Slack group created for all of the reporters working on the project: "Apparently We're A Consortium Now."

While I've been skeptical of some of the framing of the reporting on the papers, I still do generally believe it was a good thing to get this research out to the world -- even if I have little confidence that the media could ever do a good job conveying the story.

As news of the consortium broke, many people called out the fact that all of these big journalism organizations weren't actually releasing the documents they were going through themselves, often only describing them or quoting parts of them. Given that in a few cases where we've been able to see the full documents, it has appeared that some of the reporting was misleading or confused, this was a concern. And, of course, there were other concerns about the makeup of the consortium, and the fact that it was entirely based in the US.

That doesn't mean that it made sense to freely release all the documents to the public. There are plenty of reasonable concerns about privacy when you have a giant cache of internal documents. That's why it's a good thing to find out that Gizmodo has now taken on the task of making the Facebook Papers public, and doing so in partnership with a bunch of independent experts who will help Gizmodo's reporters sift through the documents and make sure that they're okay to be released:

Today, we see a strong public need can be served by making as many of the documents public as possible, as quickly as possible. To that end, we’ve partnered with a small group of independent monitors who are joining us to guide our work in preparing the papers for public release. The mission is to minimize any costs to individuals’ privacy or the furtherance of other harms while ensuring the responsible disclosure of the greatest amount of information in the public interest.

As Gizmodo notes, there are many reasons to carefully review the documents before releasing them:

More than for privacy, the documents require extra review to ensure we aren’t just handing groups of criminals and spies a roadmap to undermining the controls Facebook does have in place to detect propaganda aimed at spreading lies, hate, and fear. That would undermine any benefit the world stands to reap from this act of whistleblower justice.

The work is just beginning but we’re eager to start releasing documents as as possible. The first batch will likely consist of documents that warrant the least amount of redactions, just to get the ball rolling.

This is all good news. But it's a bit crazy that it's Gizmodo doing all this work. Gizmodo wasn't even a member of the original consortium and only joined after the first batch of stories went out. Also, Gizmodo is way smaller and with way fewer resources than many of the other members of the consortium, which includes the flush NY Times, the Washington Post, NBC, CNN, the Associated Press, Politico, Wired and more.

The fact that it took a month for any of the members, let alone one of the smaller ones, to actually decide to put together the effort to release the papers is a damning statement on how many members of the consortium see their role in the media to be a gatekeeper to information, rather than providing the public access to information.

Filed Under: facebook files, facebook papers, reporting, transparency
Companies: facebook, gizmodo

It's Ridiculous The 'Developing World' Wasn't Given Access To The Facebook Files

from the do-this-the-right-way dept

By now it's fairly clear the Facebook leaks showcase a company that prioritized near-mindless international growth over the warnings of their own experts. They also show a company that continues to painfully struggle to be even marginally competent at scale, whether we're talking about content moderation or rudimentary customer service. While this has become an all-encompassing media spectacle, the real underlying story isn't particularly unique. It's just a "growth for growth's sake" mindset, where profit and expansion trumped all reason. It just happens to be online, and at unprecedented international scale.

One thing I haven't seen talked a lot about is the fact that if you look back a few years, an awful lot of of folks in developing nations saw these problems coming a mile away, long before their Western counterparts. For a decade, international activists warned repeatedly about the perils of Facebook's total failure to understand the culture/regulations/language/norms of the countries they rapidly flooded into. Yet bizarrely, Frances Haugen's PR team somehow excluded most of these countries when it came time to recently release access to the Facebook files:

The "consortium" handling release of the files is basically a loose collaboration between 17 U.S. news orgs and a handful of European outlets. They're all being given access to redacted versions of documents Haugen provided the Securities and Exchange Commission, showing Facebook repeatedly prioritized growth and profit over, well, everything else. The whole thing was handled by Haugen's PR team via an ordinary embargo, which some oddly saw as itself somehow nefarious (it's not, embargoes, though often kind of stupid, are commonly used to maximize impact).

The real problem was who was included in that consortium. And a bigger problem, oddly not talked about until a month into the Facebook leak news cycle, was that much of the developed world was just... excluded... from the coalition by her PR reps. The exclusion of academics and researchers that could make the most sense of the data was a problem. But restricting analysis to most white, western newsrooms, (despite Haugen's very clear understanding that most of Facebook's impact problems disproportionately harmed developing nations) is particularly odd and tasteless.

For all the problems Facebook (sorry, Meta) has had in the United States in regards to managing the company's platform at scale, those problems have been dramatically worse internationally. Facebook was so excited to flood into dozens of international locations to wow investors, they didn't dedicate the time, resources, or attention needed to actually understand what they were doing. Even if they had (and the whistleblowers keep showing they absolutely didn't), the sheer scale of the expansion made it impossible to do well. That Facebook did so anyway despite being warned about it is an act of greed and hubris.

It was actually a net neutrality debate that keyed many overseas activists into Facebook's problems more than a decade ago. Activists in India were particularly sensitive to Facebook's attempts to conflate "the internet" with Facebook in developing nations. If you recall, activists in India successfully derailed Facebook's Free Basics program, which was Facebook's attempt to corner developing nation ad markets under the banner of altruism.

Basically, it involved Facebook striking deals with local wireless companies to offer discounted access to Facebook, under claims that aggressively curated version of "online" was better than no online access at all. It was a highly curated walled garden bastardized variation of AOL or CompuServe, in which Facebook decided what information, services, and resources mattered (they initially even banned encrypted services). But activists and international experts were quick to see the problem with giving Facebook this kind of power, especially in countries they didn't take the time to understand.

We've seen repeatedly how conflating "Facebook" with "the internet" (or Whatsapp with "the internet") has created a laundry list of problems that are especially pronounced in developing nations. The centralized approach of programs like Free Basics defeated the purpose of the open internet, reduced transparency, was a big boon for authoritarian governments, and helped create an even more potent funnel for propaganda. One recurring theme in whistleblower accounts is that Facebook's own researchers generally warned about all of this, repeatedly, but were ignored for profit and growth's sake.

As early as 2015 organizations like Mozilla were busy arguing that if Facebook genuinely cared about information access in developing nations, they should simply fund access to the internet itself. Facebook was ultimately forced to back off its plan in some countries like India and Egypt, but if you were a reporter or activist in these countries who pointed out the problems with Facebook's ambition, you were accused of being an enemy of the poor. When the Free Basics brand became toxic, Facebook just named Free Basics something else (sound familiar?).

There has been some valid and not so valid criticism of the way Haugen handled these latest revelations. Some have tried to argue that because she was smart enough to hire lawyers and a PR team to maximize impact she can't possibly be technically seen as a "whistleblower." There was also some brief hyperventilation over a Politico report, with some trying to claim that because she had received some money from investor Pierre Omidyar, she shouldn't be taken seriously. But a shrewd, organized whistleblower is still a whistleblower, and Omidyar proxy groups actually just funded whistleblower orgs Haugen was part of after she went public. It's actually a good thing to see a whistleblower do the right thing and not be economically and reputationally devastated for once.

But it's both weird and telling that people freaked out about these perceived injustices, but didn't notice that the whistleblower's PR coalition apparently just forgot the developing world existed:

Nobody I've talked to so far at news organizations seems clear why this seems to have happened (a strange decision for an effort geared toward greater transparency). It's not like it would be particularly difficult to coordinate the release via the same organizations in places like India that warned about Facebook's consolidated power almost a decade ago (see: IFEX). Some outlets, like Gizmodo, have been trying to expand access to the source documents to everyone. That's apparently to the chagrin of Haugen's PR team, who seems to think they can put the genie back in the bottle.

There was a certain hubris in Facebook stumbling its way across the developing world in a quest for growth without bothering to understand the impact their platform would have on foreign cultures. But there's a fairly substantial amount of hubris in excluding these developing nations from accessing raw data on a problem they've disproportionally been harmed by.

Filed Under: bias, developing nations, facebook files, facebook papers, frances haugen, india, journalists
Companies: facebook, meta

Let Me Rewrite That For You: Washington Post Misinforms You About How Facebook Weighted Emoji Reactions

from the let's-clean-it-up dept

Journalist Dan Froomkin, who is one of the most insightful commentators on the state of the media today, recently began a new effort, which he calls "let me rewrite that for you," in which he takes a piece of journalism that he believes misled readers, and rewrites parts of them -- mainly the headline and the lede -- to better present the story. I think it's a brilliant and useful form of media criticism that I figured I might experiment with as well -- and I'm going to start it out with a recent Washington Post piece, one of many the Post has written about the leaked Facebook Files from whistleblower Frances Haugen.

The piece is written by reporters Jeremy Merrill and Will Oremus -- and I'm assuming that, like many mainstream news orgs, editors write the headlines and subheads, rather than the reporters. I don't know Merrill, but I will note that I find Oremus to be one of the most astute and thoughtful journalists out there today, and not one prone to fall into some of the usual traps that journalists fall for -- so this one surprised me a bit (though, I'm also using this format on an Oremus piece, because I'm pretty sure he'll take the criticism in the spirit intended -- to push for better overall journalism on these kinds of topics). The article's headline tells a story in and of itself: Five points for anger, one for a ‘like’: How Facebook’s formula fostered rage and misinformation, with a subhead that implies something similar: "Facebook engineers gave extra value to emoji reactions, including ‘angry,’ pushing more emotional and provocative content into users’ news feeds." There's also a graphic that reinforces this suggested point: Facebook weighted "anger" much more than happy reactions. And it's all under the "Facebook under fire" designation:

Seeing this headline and image, it would be pretty normal for you to assume the pretty clear implication: people reacting happily (e.g. with "likes") on Facebook had those shows of emotions weighted at 1/5th the intensity of people reacting angrily (e.g. with "anger" emojis) and that is obviously why Facebook stokes tremendous anger, hatred and divisiveness (as the story goes).

But... that's not actually what the details show. The actual details show that initially when Facebook introduced its list of five different "emoji" reactions (to be added to the long iconic "like" button), it weighted all five of them as five times as impactful as a like. That means that "love," "haha," "wow," and "sad" also were weighted at 5 times a single like, and identical to "angry." And while the article does mention this in the first paragraph, it immediately pivots to focus only on the "angry" weighting and what that means. When combined with the headline and the rest of the article, it's entirely possible to read the article and not even realize that "love," "sad," "haha," and "wow" were also ranked at 5x a single "like" and to believe that Facebook deliberately chose to ramp up promotion of "anger" inducing content. It's not only possible, it's quite likely. Hell, it's how I read the article the first time through, completely missing the fact that it applied to the other emojis as well.

The article also completely buries how quickly Facebook realized this was an issue and adjusted the policy. While it does mention it, it's very much buried late in the story, as are some other relevant facts that paint the entire story in a very different light than the way many people are reading it.

As some people highlighted this, Oremus pointed out that the bigger story here is "how arbitrary initial decisions, set by humans for business reasons, become reified as the status quo." And he's right. That is the more interesting story and one worth exploring. But that's not how this article is presented at all! And, his own article suggested the "reified as the status quo" part is inaccurate as well, though, again, that's buried further down in the story. The article is very much written in a way where the takeaway for most people is going to be "Facebook highly ranks posts that made you angry, because stoking divisiveness was good for business, and that's still true today." Except none of that is accurate.

So... let's rewrite that, and try to better get across the point that Oremus claims was the intended point of the story.

The original title, again is:

Five points for anger, one for a ‘like’: How Facebook’s formula fostered rage and misinformation

Let's rewrite that:

Facebook weighted new emojis much more than likes, leading to unintended consequences

Then there's the opening of the piece, which does mention very quickly that it applied to all five new emojis, but quickly pivots to just focusing on the anger:

Five years ago, Facebook gave its users five new ways to react to a post in their news feed beyond the iconic “like” thumbs-up: “love,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad” and “angry.”

Behind the scenes, Facebook programmed the algorithm that decides what people see in their news feeds to use the reaction emoji as signals to push more emotional and provocative content — including content likely to make them angry. Starting in 2017, Facebook’s ranking algorithm treated emoji reactions as five times more valuable than “likes,” internal documents reveal. The theory was simple: Posts that prompted lots of reaction emoji tended to keep users more engaged, and keeping users engaged was the key to Facebook’s business.

Facebook’s own researchers were quick to suspect a critical flaw. Favoring “controversial” posts — including those that make users angry — could open “the door to more spam/abuse/clickbait inadvertently,” a staffer, whose name was redacted, wrote in one of the internal documents. A colleague responded, “It’s possible.”

The warning proved prescient. The company’s data scientists confirmed in 2019 that posts that sparked angry reaction emoji were disproportionately likely to include misinformation, toxicity and low-quality news.

Let's rewrite that, both using what Oremus claims was the "bigger story" in the article, and some of the information that is buried much later.

Five years ago, Facebook expanded the ways that users could react to posts beyond the iconic "like" thumbs-up, adding five more emojis: "love," "haha," "wow," "sad," and "angry." With this new addition, Facebook engineers needed to determine how to weight these new engagement signals. Given the stronger emotions portrayed in these emojis, the engineers made a decision that had a large impact on how the use of those emojis would be weighted in determining how to rank a story: each of those reactions would count for five times the weight of the classic "like" button. While Facebook did publicly say at the time that the new emojis would be weighted "a little more" than likes, and that all the new emojis would be weighted equally, it did not reveal that the weighting was actually five times as much.

This move came around the same time as Facebook's publicly announced plans to move away from promoting clickbait-style news to users, and to try to focus more on engagement with content posted by friends and family. However, it turned out that friends and family don't always post the most trustworthy information, and by overweighting the "emotional" reactions, this new move by Facebook often ended up putting the most emotionally charged content in front of users. Some of that content was joyful -- people reacting with "love" to engagements and births -- but some of it was disruptive and divisive, people reacting with "anger" to false or misleading content.

Facebook struggled internally with this result -- while also raising important points about how "anger" as a "core human emotion" is not always tied to bad things, and could be important for giving rise to protest movements against autocratic and corrupt governments. However, since other signals were weighted significantly more than even these emojis -- for example, replies to posts had a weight up to 30 times a single "like" click -- not much was initially done to respond to the concerns about how the weighting on anger might impact the kinds of content users were prone to see.

However, one year after launch, in 2018, Facebook realized weighting "anger" so highly was a problem, and downgraded the weighting on the "anger" emoji to four times a "like" while keeping the four other emoji, including "love," "wow," and "haha" at five times a like. A year later, the company realized this was not enough and even though "anger" is the least used emoji, by 2019 the company had put in place a mechanism to "demote" content that was receiving a disproportionate level of "anger" reactions. There were also internal debates about reranking all of the emoji reactions to create better news feeds, though there was not widespread agreement within the company about how best to do this. Eventually, in 2020, following more internal research on the impact of this weighting, Facebook reweighted all of the emoji. By the end of 2020 it had cut the weight of the "anger" emoji to zero -- taking it out of the equation entirely. The "haha" and "wow" emojis were weighted to one and a half times a like, and the "love" and "sad" were weighted to two likes.

From there, the article could then discuss a lot of what other parts of the article does discuss, about some of the internal debates and research, and also the point that Oremus raised separately, about the somewhat arbitrary nature of some of these ranking systems. But I'd argue that my rewrite presents a much more accurate and honest portrayal of the information than the current Washington Post article.

Anyone know how I can send the Washington Post an invoice?

Filed Under: algorithm, emoji, facebook papers, framing, frances haugen, journalism, let me rewrite that for you, ranking, reactions
Companies: facebook

When Facebook Turned Off Its News Feed Algorithm, It Made Everyone's Experience Worse... But Made Facebook More Money

from the oh,-look-at-that dept

For reasons I don't fully understand, over the last few months, many critics of "big tech" and Facebook, in particular, have latched onto the idea that "the algorithm" is the problem. It's been almost weird how frequently people insist to me that if only social media got rid of algorithmically recommending stuff, and went back to the old fashioned chronological news feed order, all would be good in the world again. Some of this seems based on the idea that algorithms are primed to lead people down a garden path from one type of video to ever more extreme videos (which certainly has happened, though how often is never made clear). Some of it seems to be a bit of a kneejerk reaction to simply disliking the fact that these companies (which many people don't really trust) are making decisions about what you may and may not like -- and that feels kinda creepy.

In the past few weeks, there's been a bit of a fever pitch on this topic, partly in response to whistleblower Frances Haugen's leak of documents, in which she argues that Facebook's algorithm is a big part of the problem. And then there's the recent attempt by some Democrats in Congress to take away Section 230 from algorithmically recommended information. As I noted, the bill is so problematic that it's not clear what it's actually solving.

But underlying all of this is a general opinion that "algorithms" and "algorithmic recommendations" are inherently bad and problematic. And, frankly, I'm confused by this. At a personal level, the tools I've used that do algorithmic recommendations (mainly: Google News, Twitter, and YouTube) have been... really, really useful? And also pretty accurate over time in learning what I want, and thus providing me more useful content in a more efficient manner, which has been pretty good for me, personally. I recognize that not everyone has that experience, but at the very least, before we unilaterally declare algorithms and recommendation engines as bad, it might help to understand how often they're recommending stuff that's useful and helpful, as compared to how often they're causing problems.

And, for all the talk about how Haugen's leaking has shown a light on the "dangers" of algorithms, the actual documents that she's leaked might suggest something else entirely. Reporter Alex Kantrowitz has reported on one of the leaked documents, regarding a study Facebook did on what happens when Facebook turns off the algorithmic rankings and... it was not pretty. But, contrary to common belief, Facebook actually made more money without the News Feed algorithm.

In February 2018, a Facebook researcher all but shut off the News Feed ranking algorithm for .05% of Facebook users. “What happens if we delete ranked News Feed?” they asked in an internal report summing up the experiment. Their findings: Without a News Feed algorithm, engagement on Facebook drops significantly, people hide 50% more posts, content from Facebook Groups rises to the top, and — surprisingly — Facebook makes even more money from users scrolling through the News Feed.

Considering how often we've heard, including from Haugen herself, that Facebook's decision-making is almost always driven by what will beneficially impact the bottom line the most, this deserves some consideration. Because the document... suggests something quite different. In fact, what the researchers seemed to find was that people hated it, but it made them spend more time on the site and see more ads because they had to poke around to try to find the interesting stuff they wanted to see, and that drove up ad rates. If Facebook were truly focused on just the bottom line, then, they should consider turning off the news feed algorithm -- or, just supporting the awful JAMA bill in Congress which will create incentives for the same result:

Turning off the News Feed ranking algorithm, the researcher found, led to a worse experience almost across the board. People spent more time scrolling through the News Feed searching for interesting stuff, and saw more advertisements as they went (hence the revenue spike). They hid 50% more posts, indicating they weren’t thrilled with what they were seeing. They saw more Groups content, because Groups is one of the few places on Facebook that remains vibrant. And they saw double the amount of posts from public pages they don’t follow, often because friends commented on those pages. “We reduce the distribution of these posts massively as they seem to be a constant quality compliant,” the researcher said of the public pages.

As always, there are lots of factors that go into this, and one experiment may not be enough to tell us much. Also, it's entirely possible that over time, the long term result would be less revenue because the increasing annoyances of not finding the more interesting stuff causes people to leave the platform entirely. But, at the very least, this leaked research pokes a pretty big hole in the idea that getting rid of algorithmic recommendations does anything particularly useful.

Filed Under: algorithms, chronological, facebook files, facebook papers, frances haugen, jama, leaks, news feed, section 230, user experience
Companies: facebook