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A bug in Facebook’s algorithm made us see more fake news

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A bug in Facebook’s algorithm made us see more fake news

In the past 6 months, Facebook users have seen more fake news than expected. The news, true this time, is the result of an internal investigation by Meta reported by The Vergewhich reveals how a bug in Mark Zuckerberg’s proprietary social network algorithm made fake or potentially more dangerous content more visible than usual.

In essence, Facebook engineers noticed an unexpected increase in misinformation on the platform last October. The algorithm that checks the News Feed had begun to distribute posts that should have been penalized to a greater number of users, especially those reported as fake by independent fact checkers who collaborate with the platform. According to Meta, this error would have increased the views of these contents by about 30% globally. Since October, the bug has repeated itself unexpectedly for a few more months, until the final resolution of the problem on March 11th.

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It wasn’t just fake news producers that benefited from the problem. The internal investigation revealed how the system amplified content containing nude images, violence and even posts from those Russian media recently subjected to a very severe penalty on the platform.

In a statement released to Protocol, Meta defended itself as follows: “The Verge grossly overestimated the extent of this bug. Only a very small amount of content was involved. After detecting the problem, we found the cause and worked to fix it. to the situation “.

The Facebook algorithm: what is penalized

To try to understand the meaning of this news, it is useful to take a small step back. When we browse on Facebook, what we see in our News Feed is the result of an algorithm elaboration. This artificial intelligence system shows us the posts we might like the most, based on a number of criteria such as the interactions they receive and what we do on the platform.

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The algorithm (not just Facebook’s) has a problem when users are interested in topics that can be dangerous, such as violent or fake content. For this reason, after the controversy of recent years, the social network has decided that some of the posts that are published on the platform should not be subjected to the rules of others. On the contrary: for some contents, the penalty is triggered. In other words, they are shown to very few people and do not receive the distribution boost that is generally guaranteed when, for example, a piece of content receives a lot of comments in a short time.

In September 2021, Facebook posted a note on its blog, updated in March of this year, explaining that “some types of content receive reduced distribution”. Among these, there are clickbait links, which cunningly push users to click, posts that contain comments that will likely be reported or hidden or, again, pages that are considered spam or that publish non-original videos.

Do penalties work?

The point is that this approach – certainly acceptable – often does not work, errors or not in the algorithm. In this sense, the publication of the last one has caused much discussion in the United States Widely viewed content report. This is a survey that Facebook has been conducting since last August on the most viewed content on the platform in the United States by quarter, which reveals some of the problems that the social network faces when it comes to managing problematic content.

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In particular, in the latest report, published in March, the page with the most views of the entire quarter was a page (whose name was not revealed by Facebook) removed for violating the rules of the platform. Before being banned, however, it had managed to rack up 121 million views of the content in just three months. In short, she had not really been penalized.

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