In a presentation dated May 6, an employee of Facebook asked if the ranking was good.
Probably. The same employee answered the question in smaller text.
Ranking is how the world's biggest social network prioritized what content users see in the News Feed. The list of posts that users see when they first open Facebook used to be in chronological order, but now the posts are arranged based on the value assigned to them. The employee struck at the heart of a central question within Facebook, now known as Meta: How to balance maximizing profit and growth with encouraging behaviors. According to the slideshow, the company's ranking algorithm increased how much time users spent on Facebook, but employees found it fostered worse friends. Is ranking good? Is ranking worth its consequences?
The presentation is part of the Facebook Papers, a trove of documents that offer an unprecedented look inside the most powerful social media company in the world. Hundreds of journalists obtained the records after they were given to Congress by a Facebook product manager-turned-whistleblower. In October 2021, he testified before Congress about the harms of Facebook.
As part of a rolling effort to make the Facebook Papers available publicly, Gizmodo is releasing a second set of documents. We shared 28 files related to the 2020 election and the Jan 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The public had never seen a few of the pages. The documents will be reviewed, redacted, and published by a group of experts. The committee advises and monitors our work and facilitates the disclosure of the greatest number of documents in the public interest. The value of open access to these materials is something we believe in. Our goal is to minimize any potential harms that could result from the disclosure of certain methods that Meta tackles sensitive issues like sex trafficking, disinformation, and voter manipulation.
Today's batches gives insight into how Meta chooses to rank the submissions. The company appears short on clues how to solve the problem of it's system that very few people seem to understand. These documents are a follow-up to some of the most important political events of the past two years and they are relevant to understanding Facebook's effects on the world.
The documents offer an unvarnished, if fragmented, look at years of attempts by Facebook to assign emotional value to every click on its app. Ranking is the process that has an outsized impact on the kinds of information most frequently seen on the platform. The News Feed is one of the core features of Facebook.
The term "meaningful social interactions" was introduced by the company in January. The metric was meant to help prioritize personal connections over an endless stream of online news and videos. He said that the change was framed as an effort to put first the user's happiness and health.
What is a meaningful social interaction? It could be sharing a cold beer with an old friend or a meal with the whole family under the same roof. It's a math problem and a way of training a computer to assign some degree of worth to the most benign online behaviors.
Increasing the amount of time people spend staring at their feeds has never been Facebook's goal, according to the CEO. It is a claim that flies in the face of everything we know about his business and his top deputy. If we fail to retain existing users or add new users, or if our users decrease their level of engagement with our products, our revenue, financial results, and business, we have warned investors in our financial disclosures for years. Facebook lost hundreds of billions of dollars in stock market value in February after it was reported that its active user count had dropped for the first time. The company wants to increase the time users spend on the social network.
The documents below contain an admission from one employee that is indicative of Facebook's dilemma of growth vs. user health. According to the employee, the evidence favors ranking and people like ranked feeds more than chronological ones. usage and engagement immediately drops wherever the Feed's ranking is disabled according to the employee. The increased usage comes at a price. The overall experience of the user is getting worse. The employee argues that the modified feeds change the dynamics offriending on Facebook.
The employee writes that the cost of friendship is lower for users who lack shared interests.
According to the presentation, ranking encourages the sharing of fewer meaningful posts, while allowing bad content to spread due to the costless accumulation of friends. Employees in the comments disagreed with the sentiment within Facebook.
The documents show that employees view ranking as far as they can get, and that all of Facebook hand-wringing over what it thinks is meaningful to users, or worthy of their time. They know that the future of Facebook depends on that system.
A document where one employee waxes poetic about the purpose of feeds for both Facebook users and the world at large.
Another document is poetic. The answer is sometimes for some people.
A document announcing a new ranking experiment meant to reduce inflammatory content and misinformation in high-risk countries.
A document announcing a new ranking experiment is meant to increase the amount of time users spend with it.
The document proposes a new way to think about producers and consumers.
Some of the new ways the company measures the effectiveness of demotions will be explained in 2020.
In part due to the current system's reliance on URLs, certain demotions aren't as accurate as they should be.
There are strategies for being more transparent about demotions.
A document explaining why transparency about demotions in people's feeds doesn't make users understand how legitimate those demotions are.
The company should be aware of the content demotions in the Global South. The answer is not very.
There is an internal flag about restrictions and demotions hitting content about Palestine.
A document where one employee talks about what it means to be Silenced and have a voice on the platform.
The company tested out demoting comments on people's posts.
The tradeoffs between content that is worth people's time and content that is demoted are described in a document.
There were many demotion experiments in the second half of 2020.
There is an upcoming change to political health-related content.
An internal audit of the company's demotions work.
A document describes how the company should measure and minimize the damage that can happen from demotions.
Potential ideas for demotions that might discourage bad actors from posting.
There are notes aboutMSI that contain sensitive information about Meta, so they have not been included.
An internal list of useful links to explain what meaningful social interactions are and how the company measures them.
A brief explanation of how meaningfulness gets defined on a post-by-post basis.
The internal experiment was conducted after the company changed its internal metric.
There is an overview of how MSI is measured.
There is a note questioning how muchspammy and posting behaviors contribute to the company's definition of meaningful social interactions.
There is a note about how the company plans to stop clickbait, bully and spammy comment behavior.
An internal test of reducing the impact that reacts have on ranking and demotions.
Upcoming changes to the wayMSI were measured were meant to capture more useful posts and comments.
An internal open forum is asking if the company should rethink how it measures stickers in comments.
A note detailing the results of an experiment is calculated in terms ofMSI.
An employee lamented the loss of an internal tool that helped them understand a post's ranking.
There is a post where an employee discusses Facebook's responsibilities.
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