General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsFacebook Has a Superuser-Supremacy Problem
Most public activity on the platform comes from a tiny, hyperactive group of abusive users. Facebook relies on them to decide what everyone sees.https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/02/facebook-hate-speech-misinformation-superusers/621617/
If you want to understand why Facebook too often is a cesspool of hate and disinformation, a good place to start is with users such as John, Michelle, and Calvin. John, a caps-lock devotee from upstate New York, calls House Speaker Nancy Pelosi PIGLOSI, uses the term negro, and says that the right response to Democrats with whom they disagree is to SHOOT all of them. Michelle rails against the plandemic. Calvin uses gay as a slur and declares that Black neighborhoods are always SHITHOLES. Youve almost certainly encountered people like these on the internet. What you may not realize, though, is just how powerful they are.
For more than a year, weve been analyzing a massive new data set that we designed to study public behavior on the 500 U.S. Facebook pages that get the most engagement from users. Our research, part of which will be submitted for peer review later this year, aims to better understand the people who spread hate and misinformation on Facebook. We hoped to learn how they use the platform and, crucially, how Facebook responds. Based on prior reporting, we expected it would be ugly. What we found was much worse.
Read: Facebook is a Doomsday Machine
The most alarming aspect of our findings is that people like John, Michelle, and Calvin arent merely fringe trolls, or a distraction from what really matters on the platform. They are part of an elite, previously unreported class of users that produce more likes, shares, reactions, comments, and posts than 99 percent of Facebook users in America. Theyre superusers. And because Facebooks algorithm rewards engagement, these superusers have enormous influence over which posts are seen first in other users feeds, and which are never seen at all. Even more shocking is just how nasty most of these hyper-influential users are. The most abusive people on Facebook, it turns out, are given the most power to shape what Facebook is.
Facebook activity is far more concentrated than most realize. The company likes to emphasize the breadth of its platform: nearly 2.9 billion monthly active users, visiting millions of public pages and groups. This is misleading. Our analysis shows that public activity is focused on a far narrower set of pages and groups, frequented by a much thinner slice of users. Top pages such as those of Ben Shapiro, Fox News, and Occupy Democrats generated tens of millions of interactions a month in our data, while all U.S. pages ranked 300 or lower in terms of engagement received less than 1 million interactions each. (The pages with the most engagement included examples from the far right and the far left, but right-wing pages were dominant among the top-ranked overtly political pages.)
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dchill
(38,472 posts)MetaFace is just there to help!
Moostache
(9,895 posts)Regulation is the plumber and the civil engineers rolled into one.
Coventina
(27,101 posts)keep repeating that THEY are not the problem, etc. etc. etc.
SoonerPride
(12,286 posts)It is poisoning our country.
Worse than a factory spewing toxins into the air.
Really.
Coventina
(27,101 posts)that they are in any way contributing to the problem.
SoonerPride
(12,286 posts)As if using the phone or email are tings that don't exist.
The Facebook users are addicted to it and need to be deprogrammed.
I know because I used to be a Facebook addict.
modrepub
(3,494 posts)that should tell you all you need to know about using their product.
Funny, most advertisers want to covey the good feeling associated with using a product. Facebook seems to take the opposite approach.
underpants
(182,769 posts)Maybe its because all my stuff is Apple but I dont see any of these ads often discussed.
Yes there are posts that are ads but its mostly health stuff and the replies are hilarious.
I am a member of several humor related groups and there are some funny people out there.
I will say that I crawled out of a dumbass cesspool considering people who are friends from high school and the Army. They post some really stupid crap.
SoonerPride
(12,286 posts)But don't let that bother you.
Continue to wear fur while you are at it.
I'm sure you can rationalize away your addiction.
Most addicts do.
underpants
(182,769 posts)Thank you you for spending time to type that.
FakeNoose
(32,633 posts)For the brief time that I did use Facebook, I was constantly blocking the ugly hateful political posts and comments that weren't from MY friends, but seemed to be coming from THEIR friends. It was just overwhelming and tiresome, even though I did enjoy seeing posts from family and friends. After January 6th I had to quit Facebook IMMEDIATELY. It just wasn't worth it.
Tennessee Hillbilly
(587 posts)And that the more posts they make, the more money they earn.
Obviously they don't have regular real-world jobs.
Mossfern
(2,486 posts)that I use Facebook to play mindless games. But there are a couple of friends from the old days that I see there. Funny how we PM each other when we want to talk - we should just email. The politics are all Democratic on my page.
What I don't understand is the people who need to post images of everything in their lives and - oh, the grand children! As if they are the first grandparents ever and everything they do in life needs to be shared with a gazillion people. Hey! Just do your thing and be in the moment and don't worry about taking selfies to document your every experience to a bunch of people who really don't give a shit, but say "Oh, how cute, beautiful, magnificent, amazing".... ad nauseam.
Guess this turned into a bit of a rant.