Facebook has a problem. That is, it has several but these days the number one problem seems to have become: the posts we share, the ones we interact with. Which ones are they? A few days ago the first “Widely Viewed Content Report: What People See on Facebook” was published. It was actually the second report but we get there. A move that theoretically should have put Facebook ahead of all other social networks in terms of transparency. But something went wrong. In fact, the report should have been the answer to the widespread belief that the contents that are most successful on Facebook (success is measured above all in terms of engagement on social networks) are contents of the extreme right and / or close to disinformation, in particular on the pandemic (accusation also re-launched by President Biden who affirmed that Facebook even in this way “kills people”).
This widespread belief for some time it was supported by data provided by Facebook itself through an analysis tool, CrowdTangle, which Mark Zuckerberg bought in 2016 to make it available to scholars and companies that can thus monitor their investments in advertising. The problem arose when a New York Times reporter, Kevin Rose, began to use CrowdTangle to make a daily bulletin of the most successful posts on Facebook on Twitter, a bulletin that demonstrated the great success of extremists and brawlers.
In response (or by coincidence) in April the CrowdTangle team was dismantled and reassigned to other positions: it must be said (as revealed by the New York Times), that at some point in the pandemic, the data analysts of CrowdTangle they had proposed to devote themselves to discovering how disinformation traveled on social media, but their proposal had been dropped. With CrowdTangle dismantled, Facebook started producing the content report, but not those we interact with the most (likes, shares, comments), but those most viewed, that is, those that are shown to us the most on the newsfeed. A whole different story. What does that report say? Few interesting things: it says that the most viewed contents are those that our friends report to us, that among the most shared sites are Amazon and YouTube (quite obvious), lists the URLs of the most successful posts – but also includes all the SPAM that runs on the social network. In short, very little transparency. Some have compared it to an oil company investigation into climate change.
When this report came out, it was discovered – again the New York Times – that it was not the first but the second, and that the first had not been published because the results were not judged positively by the team that manages Facebook’s public relations. . In particular, it emerged that one of the most viewed posts of the first months of the year was the “news” of a doctor in Florida who died from the covid-19 vaccine. After the New York Times complaint, the first report was actually published but the controversy did not stop. Casey Newton, one of the leading experts on digital platforms, wrote: “The publication of the Widely Viewed Content Report was a debacle, a series of unforced errors that, instead of changing the narrative in terms more favorable to Facebook, reinforced the perception that the company is hiding some inconvenient truth “. Which?
Let’s stop for a moment to fix some fixed points. The first: we are not just talking about an internal fact of a social network but about the most used platform in the world and therefore the one that most contributes to the formation of global public opinion. Second, what certainly emerges is that the problem is not the algorithm, or the contents proposed by NewsFeed, but rather our behavior, our way of reacting to the contents. We interact with the more “extreme” ones, we ignore the others. In short, the problem with Facebook is us.
That said, what happens cannot be a private event and that’s it. Ethan Zuckerman, one of the most listened to observers on the net, wrote a very harsh post on the Facebook report, concluding that we can no longer wait for Facebook to grant us the privilege of having some data chosen by them, but we must find a way to go there. to take and understand what really happens when we are online.
I report it literally: “It’s time for us to figure out how – respecting user privacy and research ethics – to get the data we need to understand what’s going on with these platforms”.
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