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Researchers say extreme content being pushed on young people and becoming normalised
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It’s well-known that these algorithms push topics to drive engagement, and naturally things that make people angry or frightened or disgusted etc enough are more likely to be engaged with regardless of what that topic is.
When outrage is the prime driver of engagement it’s going to push some people right off the platform entirely, and the ones who stay are psychologically worse off for it.
Social media execs, “we’ve done the math and it’s worth it”
They could certainly do with a control group or three. The point they’re trying to make is that over 5 days of watching recommended videos the proportion that were misogynistic grew from 13% on day 1 to 52% on day 5. That suggests a disproportionate algorithmic boost but it’s hard to tell how much that was caused by the videos they chose to view.
A real world trial ought to be possible. You could recruit thousands of kids to just do their own thing and report back. It’s a very hard question to study in the lab because it’s nothing like the real world.
They push everything negative. I always pick the chronological feed
They push the stuff that people spend more time interacting with. People tend to interact more with negative stuff.
Facebook could modify the algorithm to detect if a post is negative and discart them.
They could in theory, but that would drive down engagement and they would make less money.
It is pretty hard to identify negative posts separately from hyperbolic exaggeration though. How do you tell ridiculous rage bait from a good Onion article when the only real difference in context is who posted it?
