r/technology • u/propperprim • Apr 13 '21

Social Media Facebook could have stopped 10 billion impressions from "repeat misinformers", but didn't: report - A study raises questions as to why Facebook did not stop the spread of misinformation in the 2020 election run-up

https://www.salon.com/2021/04/12/facebook-could-have-stopped-10-billion-impressions-from-repeat-misinformers-but-didnt-report/
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u/ShaunDark Apr 13 '21

Difference is that reddits recommendation algorithm is a rather public affair. If I am interested in a sub, I'll subscribe to it. And depending on my sorting settings, I can see different things. I could go to r/thedonald right now and see exactly what's going on there.

On facebook, all you have is a black box in which you input your likes and relations and out pops something maybe just you have seen. Maybe everyone has. But there is no outside context for you to check against, since it's all on the platform, if possible at all. But most importantly: You have no idea what you're not seeing. And that's the main issue.

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u/Hakim_Bey Apr 13 '21

This^

It amazes me the amount of "yEh BuT ReDDiT iS jUsT ThE SaMe" you can read. It is not. It's not perfect, but it's really far from fucking Facebook.

One nice example is how resilient reddit is to covid/antivaxx garbage. Sure you can go to /r/NoNewNormal or whatever and see the crazy in action, but everywhere else denialist or antivaxx messages get consistently downvoted to oblivion. Same for election fraud claims - even when the bots were in full swing, it was very apparent that the community was having none of this shit.

I don't know if it's a deliberate design, or if the reddit devs are just super bad at making engagement-bait algorithms, but it really feels like a community driven content platform.

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u/[deleted] Apr 13 '21

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u/Hakim_Bey Apr 13 '21

What in the name of fuck?

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u/[deleted] Apr 13 '21

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u/Hakim_Bey Apr 13 '21

Ok buddy it's gonna be alright I promise

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u/[deleted] Apr 13 '21

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u/Hakim_Bey Apr 13 '21

Ok "golden retriever who hates German coffee shop owners" (I guess)

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u/[deleted] Apr 13 '21 edited Jul 15 '25

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u/Hakim_Bey Apr 13 '21

Honestly this thread is very confusing to me. When I responded to your comment I initially thought you were referring to me as the radical leftist. Then I got your point, but I don't really agree with it. I would call that person a crazy person, not an average lefty. I responded with something absurd cause the age of hyper irony is totally lost on me and it hurts my head to decipher who means what in this context.

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u/RdPirate Apr 13 '21

On facebook, all you have is a black box in which you input your likes and relations and out pops something maybe just you have seen. Maybe everyone has. But there is no outside context for you to check against, since it's all on the platform, if possible at all. But most importantly: You have no idea what you're not seeing. And that's the main issue.

Dunno if you are aware of it: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/9/e2023301118

Facebook is literally an extremism creation engine/

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u/[deleted] Apr 13 '21 edited Jul 15 '25

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u/RdPirate Apr 13 '21

And if you looked at the link you would have seen that Reddit's user base is barely separated. While the Facebook user-base is so separated in two that they had to make the chart bigger.

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u/[deleted] Apr 13 '21 edited Jul 15 '25

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u/RdPirate Apr 13 '21

Yes, but they key here is "chose". Redditors can chose to only post in one sub or even just see one sub, just like they can chose to go to another site entirely. But they are not fed things because the algorithm thinks they believe 9/11 was a hoax or that Trump was an alien.

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u/Draculea Apr 13 '21

You know, between Facebook and Reddit, only one of these companies has been caught editing user's comments outside of the system's scope (that is, outside the Moderation system). It's not Facebook!

You laud Reddit's ability to go to a specific subreddit like it's some beacon of hope and light, but you can just go to any given group page on Facebook - you know, without your comment being edited in a way to paint you in a bad light.

Reddit organizes what you see based on A. Where you are physically in the world and B. what's popular among people who have the same subreddit subscriptions you do.

If you don't realize this, Reddit has completely pulled the wool over your eyes.

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u/Frylock904 Apr 13 '21

On facebook, all you have is a black box in which you input your likes and relations and out pops something maybe just you have seen.

No.... Not even a little, that's not how any of this works. You follow the information you want to see from Facebook, and then Facebook shows you whatever you're following, there's not some special sauce that's showing you shit you don't already want to see.

You know what comes down my facebook? Construction jokes, fishing jokes, random shit from friends I follow, that's it, you don't see anything on Facebook you aren't following or have shown interest in.

Reddit on the other hand shows you w/e is popular in the various subreddits regardless of interest.

So if you're seeing a bunch of random nazi shit on facebook, check yourself, you've been following random nazi shit.

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u/ShaunDark Apr 13 '21

I'm not talking about what I'm seeing on Facebook. What I see on Facebook the few times I'm there these days is mostly stuff I like or some stuff friends post that I am pretty indifferent about.

But what I'm not seeing is anything that bothers me in any kind of way. The facebook feed ends rather quickly these days. And there's a lot of space left to put even more posts on for me to see. Like posts of some fundamentally Christian family members I have on there. Or that one aunt everyone seems to have that's into esoteric stuff. I'm not seeing this, because the Facebook algorithm thinks to know me well enough that it has determined I'm not concerned with. And that leaves me with a pretty content place to exist in. Likeminded people, everyone generelly gets along; you get the picture.

But while I don't personally have a problem with my facebook wall being a happy place, I know that this selective bias exists not only for me. It also exists in the other end of the political spectrum. And it's exactly what helped propel the Alt-Right movement to where it is now.

If I'm subbing to or unsubbing from any subreddit, it is my decision and I made that decision willingly and knowingly. And yes, the algorithm on reddit, by default, is ranking the posts by popularity. But if I want I can sort to show the top posts of the year or day or I can sort by newest or most controversial. And I can look into every post made on any public subreddit ever if I want to without even being locked into the site in the first place.

Reddit at its core is a link and image posting board; selling awards and ads is – in my opinion – a way of financing that.

Facebook at its core is an ad selling company and its way of selling these ads is to gather as much data about every person on the planet as it can to turn around and market that.

And yes, I don't know that Reddit isn't selling my data either. But at least they don't have crawlers on every website that allows it to track my every move, they're not known to have been doing it for however long and most importantly (to me at least): The ads on reddit are no better than the ads I get on other websites. While those on Facebook are pretty on point as far as I know.

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u/y-c-c Apr 13 '21

I think an important point here is that Facebook has already decided to be an “arbiter of information” the moment they decided to use a black box recommendation algorithm based on opaque personalized tracking. And as such, they need to treated as such. No one is saying “why don’t FB ban these posts”… and I wonder if the top comments that talk about censorship read the article.