This is correct, it's monetisation, not commissioning.
Facebook isn't paying to produce. It's paying for driving views and clicks on ads, regardless of how.
It's like if I hire a taxi driver to come to my house and drive me to the airport, and the taxi driver happens to run over a person in the process. It would be ridiculous to write 'he hired a driver to run over a person with a car'.
However, this also doesn't fully capture the reality of what is happening.
Let's say I routinely get a taxi, and taxi drivers routinely hit people because I happen to have a policy where I only pay them a large sum if they get to the airport impossibly fast, and the fastest way is to drive dangerously. Suppose I notice that every time I get a taxi, someone is run over because of my payment incentives. Suppose I then write a statement that says I will not pay the taxi if they hit a person. Suppose it keeps happening anyway, and I keep paying anyway. And suppose I benefit directly from this financially, because getting to the airport faster saves me money in missed flights.
Suppose I then do this on a worldwide scale involving many millions of people and create a market around this of tens of billions of dollars, suppose it's having a significant effect on public health and safety worldwide?
I think it's fair to then use more explicit language to hold me to account. I am financing death and destruction after all, even if technically I'm 'just getting a cab'.
As a US citizen who takes our country’s free speech norms seriously, I don’t think Meta should be aiming to deplatform even the hateful content I vehemently disagree with.
I think government should work more on helping people find alternatives to social media. The “town square effect” that makes people feel forced to use these apps is real and pernicious. That feels like a better target for regulation and taxation than content. If your business moat is based on network effects, perhaps there should be the equivalent of a land value tax on your network.
I think there is a distinct difference between deplatforming content, and simply not monetizing it. You have the right to shout in the town square but I do not have to put money in your cup when you do it.
Business is not bound to any sort of freedom of speech. There is no such thing, it does not exist. The first amendment covers government actions only.
If I owned a social media network, I wouldn’t let Nazis, MLM peddlers, transphobes, pro-gun advocates, or anti-vaxxers, among others, on my network. That’s where my moral compass lies.
Now, you might say that’s unfair, that’s not an open forum. I’m not being open-minded to other ideas or freedom-oriented.
You don’t have to agree with me. Go use someone else’s product.
The thing is, Zuckerberg has uniquely overarching control over Meta in ways that most public companies don’t. He has controlling special founder’s votes, he is the guy in charge, equivalent to a dictatorship.
That means that anything Meta allows on their platform is a reflection of Zuckerberg himself. Whether or not that’s how the eyes of the law views it is very different than how it is from a moralistic “who is responsible?” angle.
Zuckerberg can stop all hate and anger on his platform in one business meeting. Plenty of other platforms (public and private companies) including HN don’t allow the kind of conduct that Facebook and Instagram allow wholeheartedly.
He chooses not to hold high standards for his platform because anger, fear, snake oil sales, and purposeful disinformation campaigns, among other shady business ventures, are profitable.
And here we are, debating whether he and his company are responsible. After all, they just provide a neutral platform, right? If I get hit by an Amazon truck, it’s not their fault, that was a subcontractor! Companies enthusiastically create these mechanisms to detach themselves from the harm they bring.
Thank you for this poignant allegory - its so spot on - it will really open some people's minds here who are overthinking and rationalizing their current Big Corp employments.
They put you in several opposing camps. They identify the most insane content and show only that to everyone in the opposing camp.
No one cares if you clean up after your dog makes a nr 2. The anti dog poop people want to hear you don't give a fk and let Herman poop wherever he likes.
Similarly the dog owners don't want to hear you understand. They want you to talk about little poopers getting stuck in your barbed wire with razorblades.
> appear to be profiting from is "an invitation-only programme that lets you earn money from the performance of your eligible public reels, photos, stories and text posts."
The difference between “We ask white nationalists to join our invite only pay-for-views program” and “we commission white nationalists to make content” kinda seems like splitting hairs.
That bit of legalese is really important: it obscures intention, and adds layers of deniability to the rich and powerful putting their thumb on the scale. “I guess the socialists and egalitarians just lost in the totally free and fair marketplace of ideas! :shrug:”
If you want to write misleading articles to get clicks, it makes it a lot more interesting if it sounds like there's a lot of intentionality behind what META is doing.
In reality META has simply not banned or restricted these accounts from monetization. That's it! But that doesn't make for an exciting headline.
The fact that antisocial (e.g. white nationalist) content creators are the most “popular” (e.g. drive the most engagement) is not immaterial to this topic.
It’s a very flimsy defense. “It’s not my fault that the cartels pay the most for heavy weaponry.”
It’s the new smoking. It’s currently at the stage they profess ignorance while being lambasted with all the videos of them clearly knowing what was going on and lying to congress about it.
I give it a couple years before the PSA about ‘your brain on social media’ or whatever.
They are creating an environment where they incentivize it and profit from it. Whether or not that’s meaningfully different from directly commissioning it themselves seems like a minor quibble to me. It’s no different than a mob boss suggesting a rival should take a long walk off a short pier.
Yes, it says in the article that they are being paid through Meta’s content monetization program. The title is a bit of bait but it’s simply true that rage sells eyeballs so Meta does create an incentive for people to create awful content of many different types.
It sounds like the Twitter/X creator system that was recently curtailed when it didn’t have the expected results. I’m sure the same will happen to Meta’s system, if you pay for raw engagement then you tend to get trash.
Ironically, the article is itself ragebait! But that’s the media as a whole (including Meta).
“I didn’t directly tell them to make white nationalist content, I just paid them for being an engaging content creator.”
—
Hope that we get to a point as a society that we acknowledge that companies can and should be held liable for inevitable second-order effects of the decisions they make and strategies they adopt.
It certainly applies to personal liability, e.g. manslaughter.
No, Meta intentionally set up the incentive structure to reward rage bait content. You should expect they knew what they were going to get from doing that.
You don't get to be Meta's size and have Meta's experience with systems engineering and research on their own platform's incentives and outcomes, and not know exactly how this will go.
I think it depends on whether what Meta states about the "Content Monetization" program being invite only is true? If it is, that's effectively commissioning, if it's not, well Meta is lying and then the question is why lie?
First, pay people for the "engagement" their content generates, then aggressively promote the most "engaging" content. At the same time, such content is known to have certain characteristics. This is the Facebook (et al.) commissioning model.
If I may offer: Because they have become fiendishly adept at exploiting an addictive behaviour/weakness in our brains WHILE masquerading as some sort of social utility (AND perhaps vestigially retaining some semblance of that) - which, incidentally, is what (some) originally might have been, before encrappification.-
I suspect the OP understands this. Since few of those on HN (I am assuming) no longer have a FB presence, the question is why hasn't everyone arrived at this same conclusion and walked away from that addiction?
Meta should really have gone the way of MySpace a long, long time ago.
And/or MySpace should have gone the way of F'book :)
Though I hear it might make a comeback.-
PS. To your point, I am guessing: For one thing it takes the ability to thus conclude, to begin with. THAT, in turn takes intellect and time AND evidence such as has been accruing. AND third, probably, because addictions are by definition hard to quit. ALSO: I think few times in the history of addictive behaviours has the enabling agent had such a low low low entry threshold, such presumptive innocuousness, and such assumed and granted "utility". It began by hijacking human communication, "socialization". It is devious.-
Social media is a habit more than an addiction. It's easy to stop if you engage in other social activities. The trouble for many people who grew up online is that they don't have much experience doing that.
People educated in math and probability are actually still prone to gambling addiction and things.
It doesn't matter what your high level brain knows, there is a structure and organization of your brain that only changes on geologic timescales, and that structure has serious, easily attackable flaws.
I like your use of "attackable" (and of flaws, obviously).-
PS. F'book commoditized social interaction to their ends while abusing these attackable surfaces. Kalshi and that ilk have now done away with the whole pretense of communication itself and are abusing the same addiction mechanisms to commoditize OPINION to their ends. Opinions: Everybody has one.-
PS. At some point somebody is going to commoditize mere bodily movement wrapped into such an addictive mechanism and we will get people with "weird" performative "palsies" walking about.-
As many have pointed out, a lot of daily community activities are conducted primarily through Meta-owned platforms. Quite annoying, but maybe there wasn't enough effort earlier to get all these schools and other community groups using other tools to get the word out?
However, companies could en masse decide to start filtering resumes containing Meta employment history. This already happens with some other questionable industries when reviewing applications. I know I'd be hard pressed to hire anyone with a Meta background.
> This already happens with some other questionable industries when reviewing applications. I know I'd be hard pressed to hire anyone with a Meta background.
Most people that I know who use it basically only use it for Marketplace and one or two groups. (It would be better to not use it at all, but that seems fine.) Someone showed me their feed and it’s all slop, worse than Twitter.
Many people understand that it’s a waste of time, but people with low impulse control get sucked in. Same as with gambling and Candy Crush style games. And substances, for that matter. This isn’t their fault, some people are wired that way.
We really need a revival of Craigslist to eliminate the Marketplace hold on local P2P commerce.
i recently downloaded it again after nearly a decade to use marketplace to buy a bike for my wife. Got the bike and deleted the app. but my god opening it up was hell. the interface on mobile is just....stressful. super cluttered, shit all over the place with notifications and things to see. first post i saw on there was someone i used to be friends with but havent thought about in years just blatently reposting ACTUAL racist shit... bought a bike in one day and deleted the app once again. horrible experience aside from the nice old dude who sold me the bike lol
I had a similar experience logging in to FB to delete my account which was inactive for almost a decade. It’s legit was like the movie Idiocracy. Casino vibes, over stimulation, people saying stupid thing, trying to sift through lots of garbage to find the thing you’re looking for.
thats exactly what i was telling my wife, a casino is way more accurate than what i said. i was like it felt like signing on to Temu with all of the shit all over the place
I remember going to Las Vegas once after I turned 21, realizing that it totally wasn’t my thing, and especially being scared by the expressions on the zombie seniors sitting in front of the slot machines shoveling quarters in.
I see that basically every day now with people watching TikTok or Instagram while walking, on the bus, or even driving, barely able to tear their attention away. It’s like a casino except that it’s available 24 hours a day with no limits.
> especially being scared by the expressions on the zombie seniors sitting in front of the slot machines shoveling quarters in.
It's not just seniors.
I used to date a woman who worked as a cocktail waitress on the floor of a major casino on the strip. She referred to the people at the slots as "trained monkeys".
Definitely not just seniors but I saw a bus full of them unload and it was like watching a switch flip off as everyone stopped socializing and focused on the machines. So eerie.
yeah its nuts. ive hard restricted any form of social media to 15 minutes a day combined for the remaining ones i have. its been extremely healthy tbh. ive felt much better in the almost two years ive been doing it!
and i get it! the zombified rapid button pressing over and over. when i went to japan we were stoked to go check out a pachinko hall and we walked in and it was overstimulation city lol. walking in through the front door directly out through the back door haha.
My experience with Instagram too. Signed up to talk to one person who only uses Instagram, and it's just garbage all around.
I think it's a frog boiling situation. Early users got gradually accustomed to the gradually increasing garbage, but anyone who enters the ecosystem now is immediately turned off.
I use Instagram on Android because it's heavily modified and stripped to its bare essentials just for responding to friends. Prior to this I used the web app. If those two disappeared I would be done.
Instagram on Android was caught bypassing OS security requirements by opening a port on localhost, which webpages with Facebook tracking scripts would connect to to get your identity.
at the very least, insta is a semi cleaner and its the content itself thats abrasive... for now... thats the only other thing i use purely to keep up with family and i do photography so its somewhere to share some pics with family and friends.once you spend an entire night flagging everything you dont wanna see it becomes pretty clean. and then i put a 15 min timer on top of it. so it barely gets used but its semi well-tailored lol
I refuse to use facebook on mobile. Website only, and it’s terrible but that’s where the local community is if you need to find a lost dog or deal on a bike.
yup and thats exactly what i discovered. id rather not use it and also not lose any additional respect for people i used to like or have good memories with lol
In my area if you want to join any kind of amateur sports or outdoors group, you have to get on Facebook. If you want to know what musicians are coming to town, you have to get on instagram. Ironically it's usually the young, anti establishment types who tend to have only instagram presence.
Depending on your interests, getting off meta platform may very well result in a net loss of real life activity you can participate.
From what I have heard, Facebook is also the place to rent cheap apartments. The mom and pop landlords are Facebook only. The local Craigslist is dying and scam ridden. Big name rental websites tend to only have listing for pricier, corporate owned rentals.
It's not like traditional media is any better. At least with social media platforms the means of producing media and building a following has been democratized.
I'll help you understand: Important information is many times only found on these platforms. Many local businesses and events only have their info on Facebook or Instagram. Many local community groups are only on Facebook, and you'll find information there that has a real impact on your life (like bus broke down).
The other part is messaging. In parts of Europe nobody uses WhatsApp or SMS to communicate, everybody is on Facebook messenger.
And there's still the old school social media posts: cousin had a baby, friend got married. And also content made for the general public which is not malicious.
Yeah, Instagram is by far the most reliable communications channel from my kid's school, believe it or not. Like, there are mailing lists and portals you can log into, but the IT aspect of actually getting access for even one parent, let alone both, is such a fucking slog for everyone involved (and who knows what bullshit the school has to deal with from their side) that we get info through our WhatsApp group chat from the parents who have Instagram.
Once I overcame the addiction tech, engineered over billions of brilliant-person-hours, atop research into human behavioural prediction and conditioning that’d make the KGB blush?
It’s the hundreds of people on my Facey that I have no other way to contact, and whom I can’t convince to move to e.g. Mastodon, even by offering to do or automate it for them. I suppose I could get an agent to run through the list with a script that gives my phone number to anyone who expresses a wish to remain in touch.
Quora has become a scam and CP-ridden cesspit but there are still some old-timers who can really write, and whom I’ve become somewhat emotionally invested in. And a habit of 13 years is hard to break.
I don't use FB or insta , but here are some reasons why people use it:
- Keep in touch with family
- Comfort from having their ideas reinforced
- Organize small events
- Share pictures easily
- not feel lonely
- stay current on world events
All of those have other routes to accomplish the same thing, but I guess they have the "Dropbox effect" of simplifying it so even techno challenged can use it.
Meta is easier for that stuff, I won't deny. Nevertheless, we've managed to get our families into Signal groups that largely accomplish the same things at the scale we need. And the benefits of not needing to wade through slop make up for the losses. It's so peaceful! Hopefully more people give it a try.
I'm not sure if you're talking about Meta platforms or social media in general. It's been years since I've used any Meta platform but I'm a daily user of Tiktok.
On Tiktok I don't think the platform is paying people to rage bait, at least not directly. But wannabe influencers will still try and rage bait their way into a viral video and hopefully a following. To me it's entirely transparent and I just move on but people fall for it. Lots of people. Gender wars is easy pickings. A good example was the $3 cheese surcharge on a burger. I knew immediately that was fake and it was later confirmed [1].
But why am I on Tiktok? Because there's actually some good stuff on there and just some plain entertaining stuff. But what really seals it is the comments. Therea re a ton of videos where the comments are the best part. There are some funny people out there. And Tiktok more than any other platform I've experienced seems to surface such comments.
But I could best describe Facebook as your racist uncle posting conspiracy theories and that's pretty much it.
> Why anyone still engages with these platforms is totally beyond me.
Because it provides a form entertainment, low hanging entertainment. All designed to grip you in your weakest fronts.
Map out what triggers a person visually. Feed it in to a LLM model and on the evil scale, you can start exploiting those who get angry based on whatever content.
Anger is one of the easiest trigger points in form of media. Broadcast a opposite view of an individual or a group. Downvotes and Upvotes are the primitive form of this and if you lack the emotional intelligence (thick skin) to handle the flack, you end up turning on emotions.
Tabs are superior to spaces and Python is basically JavaScript with indentation.
Because they influence a lot of opinions which influences decisions which ends up influencing all our lives. Back around 2016 bots were loose on ut internet, with everyone freely gobbling up misinformation. Now there is an unofficial army of people determined to keep facts up at the forefront as well as other malicious social media negative trends at bay.
I will call out the ABC here for taking a lot of the boots on the ground work that Tom Tanuki - independent journo (https://youtube.com/@tomtanuki) has done with these far right slopaganda mills, slicing off the prior recognition and pretending it's a big new problem they just found.
While a bit of this is new... Is it that new? Is this report that detailed? Hmmmmm
Well, they claim they've done their own independent investigations, maybe started because of that bloggers/vloggers work, but still could be independent. What exactly is pointing towards it not being independent? It seems to be a detailed enough account of why the people break Facebook's own guidelines, yet receive money from Facebook.
Facebook is still big in my country, Lithuania, and both rage-bait and other type of fringe content is rampant, and even worse after fact-checking was removed. It is wild, and with some outside actors (specific country that shall not be named) it is a big problem with political and social effects being felt IRL.
And is Lithuania doing anything about it? In Romania Facebook and TikTok do whatever they please, and whatever they are paid to do, with complete impunity as the authorities actively do nothing at all.
Our police has a page called "Virtual Police Patrol" which allows reporting of these cases. Some of the worst trolls have been prosecuted and sentenced. But we're not doing much regarding Facebook itself, just cleaning up with the results of it.
This isn't anything new, it was abundantly clear after Facebook removed their fact checking team during covid that the priority was engagement over everything else, and rage bait is exactly that.
I just want to add, that they (FB and other big social media) probably understood what propaganda power they wield after 2016 facebook and cambridge analytica scandal.
Personally - I think that this was the moment when silicon valley billionaires without shadow of a doubt understood that they have power what used to be reserved only for state actors. Bonus - for using that power they get fined penny on the dollar at most or just slap on the wrist.
Update: now situation is even worse - states actively buy propaganda with social media companies, making those companies even more rich and influential.
COVID-era “fact checking” went way beyond its remit and started to become a political tool. This had negative consequences for the average person’s trust in institutions of all kinds, because people really don’t like it when you attempt to police their individual political speech, even if it’s clearly inaccurate (as it so often is). It’s a good thing that it was removed.
The problem with Meta is the monetization and engagement model, not the lack of fact checking.
> because people really don’t like it when you attempt to police their individual political speech
I'm not sure that I buy that when people's health are at stake. When things are objectively false, and spreading that information will actively harm people, you have a responsibility and duty of care to point out falsities. But that's just me.
It isn’t just you, but it also isn’t everybody. Dissent is always present, and the 1st amendment ensures that people have the right to speak their mind. Having the government lean on private platforms to pressure them into censorship, especially in a coordinated fashion, violates that right. Even if the government attempts to launder that pressure through a maze of domestic and foreign NGOs.
“Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.”
Meta has already been okay with drug use by allowing people to place ads and other posts clearly promoting drug use/sales. IIRC, 404 Media did an article on this
What's the latest social media platform position on being labeled a publisher? Aren't they against that?
The constitution guarantees free speech, but not free drug use (though maybe it should). So I don't see any contradiction here. Meta has every right to police speech as it is a private company, but it has no obligation to do so.
I don't think the issue here is whether FaceBook is acting illegally, but whether it is acting responsibly, or just enshittifying society for it's own benefit.
Note incidentally that "free speech" doesn't mean you can say what you like. Yes, you can go out in public and swear and engage in hate speech - all legal - but for example you can't incite others to commit crimes, cross over into disorderly conduct, shout "fire" in a theater, etc.
The egregious part is the amplification part. Profit derives from that. Transmission and protection are neutral and they are necessary for all information especially if there is a history of freedom of expression; though of course some governments and others like regulating permissible expression.
Facebook is doing that in India as well. They are becoming Government Lap dog and do as its comfortable to their profits. Government of India able to suppress many dissent in recent years because of social media suppression. BTW Current government control News Channels by other means, we have term for Indian news channel as Godi Media. "Godi" in hindi literally means lap.
Transmission and protection are not neutral. They're a choice. Facebook has freedom of association and is allowed not to host content they believe harmful. Something they already do extensively. [1]
They are a choice, yes, the same way anything is. They are neutral choices in the same way roads and other infrastructure "permitting" criminals to use them are. The fact that Meta does not choose to be neutral in all such cases is not an argument against that.
Yes, but that is perfectly ok because we live in a society with not only freedom of speech but also freedom of the press, so it necessarily follows that it is ok to distribute speech that you don't like to a willing audience and also to profit from it. If that isn't ok, then neither is HN or the New York Times.
"Legal" and "perfectly okay" (aka socially acceptable or virtuous in some other way) are different things. If HN started paying people to post socially divisive content that wouldn't be okay at all (though it would almost certainly be legal).
Have you ever read it? It was published in _1970_ and the content isn't really about stealing books, but about fighting against the government and corporations. Its more political commentary than anything else.
Yes, bookstores should stock it, and libraries should shelve it. Its something everybody should read at least once, for some perspective at least.
Just to add onto this; Instagram purposely floats controversial comments to the top of a comment section for "engagement" purposes. I've seen this many times.
I've noticed that when my partner and I look at the same Instagram post (within a few minutes of each other), we get completely different "top" comments. I suspect Instagram is ordering the comments individually for each user to maximize engagement.
All social media is drifting towards being a mirror that reflects your worst tendencies back at you. No content restrictions will fix this - the whole personalized approach to media is fundamentally rotten.
Facebook figured out a long time ago that "ragebait" and profit are transitively connected via "engagement". They recognized that anger, hate, fear, and all negative emotions can ALSO bring in a LOT of clicks.
This is true of every social media that operates around engagement. Reddit, twitter, tiktok, etc. the model failed in every way except for making money. Hell, it's true of hacker news sometimes!
This sucks, I feel like most people are so done with rage bait content but it's what the platforms have proven makes the most money. At this point it would take a new platform with a different paradigm to get people to stop but also no one wants a new app to keep track of.
If you use the friends or "all" feeds, you just get stuff about what your friends are up to and things from pages you've subscribed to. Or I do anyway. Also good for discovering events locally.
Even the main feed isn't that bad for me. I guess it depends who your friends are and what you click on.
I use FB for genealogy, because there are a lot of local groups where people post historical pictures, and older people in general are more active on Facebook.
I've seen some local groups taken over by ragebait slop, though. Ironically, not even right wing rage bait slop. As far as I can tell, it finally boiled over for the admin of the page, who was a fairly liberal guy in an extremely rural place, when a local museum found out he was anti-Trump and stopped collaborating with him on local history (maybe for fear of other's reactions). Since then he's strictly reposted rage material from other places/people on Facebook, much of it clearly low effort/AI generated.
I can't judge him, he lives there after all, and from this side of the ocean my political sympathies are definitively closer to him than to his enemies. Still :/
I'm not surprised, I quit because I kept getting pushed this content for a long while and suspected as much. Same is happening on nextdoor for sure, whenever I login there's some pushed post that creates a bunch of engagement of someone stating something very political and controversial. It almost feels funny how bluesky and other platforms lack this sorta rage bait being prioritized. Facebook and friends sold us out hard and made society suffer. Stop using their services.
Every other day, my feed seems to be filled with pro-Republican posts, followed by pro-Democratic posts the next. It’s fascinating how the model decided this was the kind of content worth generating.
To some degree I think social media algorithms already altered our behavior enough that extreme and controversial content generation would continue even if we disabled the algorithms. They've reinforced the memes enough now that they are self-sustaining.
"The Model" didn't decide anything. Facebook and these other attention economy companies have been A/B testing for two decades now, and there have been multiple "Metas" they have found. They have all converged eventually on ragebait being an extremely effective engagement driver.
They didn't just run a linear regression or whatever on some data and magically get the most rage inducing system. They made conscious decisions at nearly every step to make changes to optimize for "Engagement", which at this point is a code word that means "Controversial" the same way that a video of someone eating a toddler would be "Controversial"
It's digital crack pointed at a subsection of our brain that evolved to do group signalling.
For some reason I always get insane deals locally on Marketplace. Bought a brand new 3DS with 4 games this weekend 5 kms away from me for ~50€. People would sell this for 200€ on eBay.
I have a dedicated profile for marketplace. I managed to keep it separate from my real meta account for a long time but they eventually tricked me into linking it. We need a Wikipedia model online marketplace. Craigslist was close, but didn’t keep up.
Every single time historically we have unregulated media you get a shitshow. I think you can blame our societies nonchalant lassez faire attitude to the propaganda profiteering by American big tech for lots of the issues we face today. Honestly: do cocaine laced recommender algorithms really benefit us? I really hope the EU fully bans this stuff.
My country has had totally unregulated media for 250 years. I'm not sure what other historical examples you have to justify your moral panic, and I understand that more authoritarian societies will struggle with such an approach but I assure you that we have been doing just fine in spite of the occasional chaos.
Care to elaborate? You don’t think the creator of “You should self harm: the TV show” would’ve been regulated and held accountable for the detrimental consequences back in the day? Not saying it was perfect back then, but today I do think internet media companies are out of control.
Uh, the Hays Code is actually a premier example of "Industry Self regulation", as well as it's replacement, the equally absurd and incestuous MPAA ratings system.
It's the exact "Industries have an incentive to self regulate" talking point that conservatives have long used to say industries should be less regulated
And you are pointing to it as an example that we shouldn't use the government to regulate media.
Meanwhile, I think the FCC does a pretty good job, where their regulatory bar is "You cannot blast boobs or these swears over the public wireless spectrum, everything else is fair game", including an entire TV channel called "Fox News" which has had to argue in court on at least one occasion that nobody would assume any program on "Fox News" was news, rather than entertainment.
Right, cos we know that it's regulated - Elon rules X/Twitter, Mark rules Facebook, and shareholder value rules the others. In fact it's even more regulated now because Donald rules over them.
Aren't the UK's D-notices advisory. I thought they could be (and often are) ignored by media outlets. I don't think they warrant a mention alongside Pravda.
True, I suppose UK “super injunctions” would be more apt, although the D-notice system has been used multiple times to successfully prevent information from reaching the public.
FB and IG reels both.
Twitter gets a lot of rightfully owed criticism about it's fair share but its always weird to me seeing people slam twitter then go right on to IG or some other meta owned app as if its significantly different.
I'm so glad I got myself off Instagram and Reddit, the longer I go without them the more I realise what massive cognitohazards both of them are if you spend too much time on them. Different mechanisms but both were much more of a net drain on me than I realised before leaving them.
I use both IG and Twitter. IG reels for me are largely funny videos, stuff I follow, and stuff I'm interested in. On Twitter I only follow tech stuff and yet about 20% of the stuff in my 'recommended' feed is racist, violent, and stuff I have zero interest in. Even if you hit the 'non interested' button they continue to shove it down your throat.
Is it ethical wrong in this case, to wish those persons to get beaten up one day, by one of the people where they fueled their hate (who do take it out on other people for real)? So they reap what they sow?
Wishing for something doesn't make it happen. So we should consider the effect that this wishing has on you: does wishing for vengeance make you a worse, or better, person? I'd try to avoid it, myself.
If you're in a position where you're actually making the decision between letting these harmful practices continue, or putting a stop to them, that's different. But in this society, such people are more likely to be journalists and justices than vigilantes, so violence is still inappropriate. I think the scenario you described, of those incited to violence turning on the inciters with violence, is rather unlikely in reality, and it wouldn't necessarily be a good thing.
There is no solution based on censorship that doesn't undermine democracy. If you want Facebook to censor people/content/ideas that you don't like it is going also to censor vital information needed for a democracy to work.
The best solution for now seams to be what twitter is doing with community notes.
I stopped logging into Faecebook, years ago, because it marked most of my posts as spam (I tended to post "look at my latest" stuff, there, so I understand why; but it rendered the platform worthless, for me).
However, I'll lay odds that if I had posted that Hitler was just a misunderstood genius, my posts would have gone viral throughout the system.
I have a very mixed friend group from hard left and hard right and they all get their own little bubble of rage bait that amplifies their own beliefs. Since i have them in my feed I get this crap from both side in my feed thanks to the algorithms. So i barely touch the site anymore
This is a tired rehash of the same panic we had after 2016. In short: “Oh no, if we allow unrestricted communications, people may turn this into political advantage!” No shit. That’s the point of free speech.
As always, the only solution is twofold: (1) end the targeted advertising business model (for everyone, not just Meta) and (2) acknowledge and address the underlying social and economic problems affecting average people. But of course the establishment has no interest in pursuing either one of these. And so popular anger will continue to build.
I’m sure that shutting down the few release valves for that anger is a great solution.
This is a really funny way to describe Facebook's (and Youtube's, and TikTok's, and...) entire business model. It's long been known that they aggressively promote ahem "engaging" content. How do they incentivize people to make it? Ad revenue!
Maybe they should pay their programmers to fix the audio bug in their iOS app. I can't listen to my podcasts and use the facebook app at the same time because it wants to mute the podcast to play nothing, even with the phone on silent and autoplay disabled the facebook app just randomly mutes my podcasts for no reason making me not want to use the app.
Social media platforms have been paying out for attention seeking behaviour for a long time now. It’s why every YouTube video now has the same lame shocked face, red arrows, and clickbait title. It’s why assholes film themselves intentionally pissing people off for TikTok. It’s a whole category called nuisance tubing.
I remember during COVID I saw a number of YouTubers swing from producing normal content into conspiracy shit. Their views ballooned. I saw a nasty feedback loop where the more controversial content received more engagement, hence more ad revenue, leading to more of it being produced.
These platforms are actively degenerating society; there’s a reason the CCP is keeping tight control and reportedly rebalancing things to promote educational creators on China’s.
Indeed. What I noticed is that the quality of the videos went down on youtube in the last 3 years. Now, the quality was never as great as it used to be anyway, but Google changed various things that made youtube worse. They are slowly killing off youtube without realising it.
A lot of channels got bought by private equity. YouTube is saturated with similar content so creators have to resort to clickbait to keep up. AI has allowed creators to increase their efficiency writing scripts.
I don't know what you believe Google changed about YouTube, but I believe it has just made itself worse.
It's difficult for me to understand what people are getting out of the youtube experience, as I'm pretty straight up intolerant of most of the traits of this kind of content - all I hear recently from the neighbours kid's tablets and phones is loads of stuff with too-fast too-intense mono-tone TTS.
Such a shame that people take up against AI, rather than the people selecting and serving them slop.
CCP is keeping tight control over social media platforms first and foremost to prevent spreading information which could topple CCP.
"Last month 60 popular celebrity gossip sites were closed overnight for corrupting "core socialist values," and a new regulation released in May requires all online news portals to be managed by Communist Party-sanctioned editorial staff."
It also has a lot of other side effects. One of them seems to be a more stable, prosperous society. I don't like that a totalitarian dictatorship is more stable and prosperous than us, maybe we should fix that?
No, they actually do have a paternalistic drive to keep things healthy and pro-social above and beyond some Bond villain stuff.
I mean, yes, you also can't get away with organizing an opposition, but they really do care about social cohesion and good family values above and beyond that.
(Also, one should always note that the BBC is state owned when they write articles full of invective like this).
The priorities of CCP are suppressing opposition first and social cohesion and good family values second. If you don't like state owned BBC, you can read for example non-state owned Guardian about the state of Chinese media landscape.
I respect the BBC's independence actually, I don't think they're meaningfully worse than CNN. It's just a funny detail that they completely gloss over their own status while saying "communist party media" this and that.
The Chinese media landscape doesn't support anti-Chinese narratives and the US/UK media landscape, while totally free, somehow never produces anti-Anglo narratives[1]. It's not a conspiracy, it's a culture.
[1]: There are safe anti-anglo narratives where various defeated/killed people have a valid grievance and we should all cry about it, as long as they're all dead and a non-threat.
Your first paragraph and second contradict each other somewhat. Celebrity gossip sites are not likely to threaten the party. On the contrary they may well work as "opium for the people", or circus with the bread, to keep dissent down.
The party doesn't actually need "core socialist values" to stay in charge. They could easily have adopted a Putin (or Napoleon, or Caesar) attitude of "I don't give a damn about the framework legitimizing my rule, as long as you acknowledge me as the boss".
People want to feel like they're doing something in the "culture war". Rage-bait gives them an outlet. Facebook might be saving us from total civil war here.
The distinction disappears when Facebook incentivizes the creation of the rage-bait content by prioritizing it in their algorithm. They can, at any moment, de-rank rage-bait, but they don't. That clearly signals "make rage-bait for our platform and we'll pay you."
Contrast it with something like Elsagate. Google actioned the offending creators and attempted to deprioritize the kind of content that caused the controversy. Facebook would do the same if they didn't condone rage-bait.
>They can, at any moment, de-rank rage-bait, but they don't. That clearly signals "make rage-bait for our platform and we'll pay you."
They don't because they don't select for it. They disporotionally push engagement but as far as I know don't have some indians or AI working tirelessly analysing countless videos to categorise them and rank them according to how ragebaity or controversial they are. Those things just rise to the top out of their effort to drive engagement and screentime.
Any alternative that does the same will end up with similar result.
I find it hard to believe that Facebook's feed is "dumb" and only promotes what's engaging the most users. They serve you content that they think you will find engaging, and there has to be some automatic categorization as a result.
And regardless, even if they don't select for rage-bait, they still refuse to take action against accounts that repeatedly post it, making your interjection largely pointless.
It's not dumb and promotes what's engaging for users individually algoritmically without categorising. That's the not dumb part about it.
>They serve you content that they think you will find engaging, and there has to be some automatic categorization as a result.
And this can be completely smart or dumb depending on how you look at it. From my perspective it's a smart algorithm still.
If you like or comment on far right or far left ragebait or just ragebait in general then it can serve you ouput from accounts who attract engagement from others who also engage witht hat video. Aka similarly minded people get similarly minded content semi organically as a result of optimising for engagement.
It can do so without genuenly knowing that the video is of category xyz and promoting that specific category but automatically it detects that people who engage with video y are also more likely to engage with video z. The ideological and engagement type bubbles create themselves as a result.
>even if they don't select for rage-bait, they still refuse to take action against accounts that repeatedly post it, making your interjection largely pointless.
The definition of ragebait is vague. Your supressing ragebait is another person's ragebait or supressing of desimination of societal issues.
It can be a video of violent crime or of political corruption. Of war or religious extremism. It can be sharing statistics, supporting misogynistic or xyzfobic talkingpoints or exposing them, etc
In a society facing economic decline, corruption or cultural upheaval or what have you you will be stepping on toes whichever way you go.
I'd say it's better to either outright ban this kind of social media which will be deeply unpopular or to focus wholely on tackling the divisive issues that lead people to be attracted to some of the dominant topics.
"an invitation-only programme that lets you earn money from the performance of your eligible public reels, photos, stories and text posts." implies this is only available to a subset of people?
We've become a provocateur type of society... Lady Gaga, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Mr. Beast, Jake/Logan Paul... it's all the same thing at the end of the day. They harvest attention and in return funnel their audience towards ads, merch, OnlyFans, etc.
First of all, Facebook is not even the worst offender. That'd have to go to X and TikTok. Rage bait, propaganda, and straight up bad actors with money pushing their agenda. If you got angry because of a TikTok video, you are being exploited.
Some of these actors also put a lot of money into campuses in the west, so when you're done watching some terrible propaganda, you can join a local club and find your way to more people getting angry at misinformation. This is how we get stuff like "globalize intifada" and students "occupying" buildings.
I wish this was just hyperbole, but really, go check for yourself what kind of money state actors put into schools and universities in the west, and why.
When will people learn that rage bait content thrives thanks to people who are so delicate and emotional that they get unhealthily enraged at such content?
Stop raging on the internet and the rage bait content will disappear overnight.
Stop buying oil, chasing newest phones, luxuries, and the climate will get better overnight.
It’s all on the consumers, contrary to Redditor belief that the big corporations are at fault, it’s simply the matter of demand and thus supply. Not the other way around.
Take accountability. I know nowadays it is very unpopular to take accountability but this is the first step to make world better place. You can only change your own habits.
Any solution that requires individuals to “just” do something that’s contrary to their nature is not a solution.
No society has ever solved a serious problem by “just” doing something on an individual scale en masse.
Think about what you’re suggesting. Individual action that acts like coordinated action. It’s impossible at scale. It’s a total contradiction.
(This is not even touching on the fact that the vast majority of oil use and pollution comes from military, energy, and industrial uses, not individual consumers.)
This does not imply that every problem can or even should be solved, but you’re not going to solve it this way.
Out of interest, would you have made this argument with respect to Big Tobacco back in the day? In my view surveillance-based behavioural recommendation engines belong very much in the same category.
Well, you use their platform and thus line their pockets. Why? Because it’s convenient, it’s lazy and “free” and you sold your soul and data for far too cheap.
If the population cannot behave in their best interest then the whole western civ gets Darwin Award and I am fine with that honestly.
And it is actually happening in real time in almost all categories from fertility rate to losing psychological warfare.
You can say a lot of words on any given topic on a niche technology board but what does that change?
What can you do to change this situation? If there is a want then there are opportunities to make a difference.
Look, I don’t expect everyone to go into politics or become some kind of chief activist but I would love for people to be more aware of their collective strength and power.
To dispel the too pervasive illusion of powerlessness and false narrative (I wonder where that came from btw) about lack of agency.
Today’s divisions (I wonder where that came from) make it harder to group up with people when everyone is so split and radical and polarised (I wonder where that came from)
Look, I may make a lot of quite fervent comments on this site a lot of the times but it is just because I see 24/7 how we are getting tricked into less and less personal freedoms.
Now people understand why Suckerberg is called Suckerberg.
Those greedy billionaires also keep on having ties to right wing nuts. Let's not forget Melon Usk with his suspicious right-arm-raising gestures (having done so twice, which is quite strange when you do the same gesture twice in a row - I mean there can be no doubt about this if you do it twice; twice is an accident?).
It is not only rage bait. They like the new corporate fascism and that its followers believe that the right wing will fix the economy.
Maybe they have some romantic ideals about the 1930s, where Schacht fixed the economy for Hitler with a form of quantitative easing. But that scheme became unsustainable around 1938.
The difference is that back then the powerful needed people. The current Silicon Valley "elites" want to get rid of everyone, make them dumb and replace them with AI.
The sooner the right wing audience realizes this, the better.
Why do the richest and most powerful humans, who have seen all of the world and its wonders, and can go anywhere anytime, and get all the luxuries our civilization has to offer, and never have to struggle for anything in their lives..
Because, often, that's how they became the richest, most powerful humans. If your goal is to have money and power, and you have more today than yesterday, the world for you didn't get worse.
Similarly, Meta is paying violent illegal israeli settlers, who commit attrocities against Palestinians in the West Bank in order to steal their land. Same mechanism.
How is this any different than traditional media? Cable news creates fake problems and controversy constantly, and pay their news anchors well to do so.
In return, many companies that rely on these problems, turn around and advertise on these networks.
What are you trying to say? That Facebook should be excused because others also behave badly?
Otherwise, we can dislike both things and it adds nothing to say "but why aren't your talking about the other thing instead". And for what it's worth, there is a pretty clear difference between the journalistic standards of FB bait and of the legacy media.
Social media has been protected by the Safe Harbour rules because they had millions of users creating content which was difficult to monitor and moderate.
If they start producing their own content they might get considered like a news organisation with a whole different set of rules being applied to them and Safe Harbour being inapplicable.
Safe Harbor should never have been a thing. Newspapers and other publications accepted "user content" without any safe harbor -- and they exercised judgement over what they would publish. If a reader sent in an obscene rant as a letter to the editor, it wouldn't make it any further than the nearest bin.
If an online platform can't figure out how to do that, it's really their problem to solve, not one they should just get to shove on society with some lectures about "parenting" or other nonesense.
One big difference is regulation and algorithms. All viewers/readers see the same content in traditional media, and they’re all subject to scrutiny by government regulators (however effective or not they may be).
Social media networks display different things to different people so it’s borderline impossible to know exactly what they’re even showing. That makes regulation extremely difficult.
More broadly, this perspective depresses me. I’m old enough to remember the promise of the internet when we first all got it: that it would democratise information and we’d be able to break free of the issues with traditional media. Fast forward to today and we’re asking “why shouldn’t the tech giants monetise hate speech?”. How far we’ve fallen.
With social media you can spend small amounts of money , create media and target people half across the globe from you.
ruzzian troll farm employee cannot call into fox news and say “create 100 John Does impersonating MAGA texans (or whatever), present them as real and I will pay you 5$ for that”. Such troll can automate all this and present media somewhat realistically on FB.
>> How is this any different than traditional media?
Facebook is global. Traditional media is much more heavily regulated in some countries and while it may not be perfect, it's not comparable to the shit show that is social media.
I think this is a bit misleading.
It sounds to me like the creators are creating and uploading the content, and then that is getting monetised on the platform?
The title makes it sound like meta is commissioning the content? I don't think that is the case here? Or is it?
Directly commissioning someone to create it is pretty wild.
This is correct, it's monetisation, not commissioning.
Facebook isn't paying to produce. It's paying for driving views and clicks on ads, regardless of how.
It's like if I hire a taxi driver to come to my house and drive me to the airport, and the taxi driver happens to run over a person in the process. It would be ridiculous to write 'he hired a driver to run over a person with a car'.
However, this also doesn't fully capture the reality of what is happening.
Let's say I routinely get a taxi, and taxi drivers routinely hit people because I happen to have a policy where I only pay them a large sum if they get to the airport impossibly fast, and the fastest way is to drive dangerously. Suppose I notice that every time I get a taxi, someone is run over because of my payment incentives. Suppose I then write a statement that says I will not pay the taxi if they hit a person. Suppose it keeps happening anyway, and I keep paying anyway. And suppose I benefit directly from this financially, because getting to the airport faster saves me money in missed flights.
Suppose I then do this on a worldwide scale involving many millions of people and create a market around this of tens of billions of dollars, suppose it's having a significant effect on public health and safety worldwide?
I think it's fair to then use more explicit language to hold me to account. I am financing death and destruction after all, even if technically I'm 'just getting a cab'.
As a US citizen who takes our country’s free speech norms seriously, I don’t think Meta should be aiming to deplatform even the hateful content I vehemently disagree with.
I think government should work more on helping people find alternatives to social media. The “town square effect” that makes people feel forced to use these apps is real and pernicious. That feels like a better target for regulation and taxation than content. If your business moat is based on network effects, perhaps there should be the equivalent of a land value tax on your network.
I think there is a distinct difference between deplatforming content, and simply not monetizing it. You have the right to shout in the town square but I do not have to put money in your cup when you do it.
Business is not bound to any sort of freedom of speech. There is no such thing, it does not exist. The first amendment covers government actions only.
If I owned a social media network, I wouldn’t let Nazis, MLM peddlers, transphobes, pro-gun advocates, or anti-vaxxers, among others, on my network. That’s where my moral compass lies.
Now, you might say that’s unfair, that’s not an open forum. I’m not being open-minded to other ideas or freedom-oriented.
You don’t have to agree with me. Go use someone else’s product.
The thing is, Zuckerberg has uniquely overarching control over Meta in ways that most public companies don’t. He has controlling special founder’s votes, he is the guy in charge, equivalent to a dictatorship.
That means that anything Meta allows on their platform is a reflection of Zuckerberg himself. Whether or not that’s how the eyes of the law views it is very different than how it is from a moralistic “who is responsible?” angle.
Zuckerberg can stop all hate and anger on his platform in one business meeting. Plenty of other platforms (public and private companies) including HN don’t allow the kind of conduct that Facebook and Instagram allow wholeheartedly.
He chooses not to hold high standards for his platform because anger, fear, snake oil sales, and purposeful disinformation campaigns, among other shady business ventures, are profitable.
And here we are, debating whether he and his company are responsible. After all, they just provide a neutral platform, right? If I get hit by an Amazon truck, it’s not their fault, that was a subcontractor! Companies enthusiastically create these mechanisms to detach themselves from the harm they bring.
Thank you for this poignant allegory - its so spot on - it will really open some people's minds here who are overthinking and rationalizing their current Big Corp employments.
They put you in several opposing camps. They identify the most insane content and show only that to everyone in the opposing camp.
No one cares if you clean up after your dog makes a nr 2. The anti dog poop people want to hear you don't give a fk and let Herman poop wherever he likes.
Similarly the dog owners don't want to hear you understand. They want you to talk about little poopers getting stuck in your barbed wire with razorblades.
> appear to be profiting from is "an invitation-only programme that lets you earn money from the performance of your eligible public reels, photos, stories and text posts."
The difference between “We ask white nationalists to join our invite only pay-for-views program” and “we commission white nationalists to make content” kinda seems like splitting hairs.
That bit of legalese is really important: it obscures intention, and adds layers of deniability to the rich and powerful putting their thumb on the scale. “I guess the socialists and egalitarians just lost in the totally free and fair marketplace of ideas! :shrug:”
The invitation is automated
Oh, that’s good, because if you automate something then you’re automatically absolved from all responsibility for its actions.
And you certainly shouldn’t bother monitoring what it’s doing.
If you want to write misleading articles to get clicks, it makes it a lot more interesting if it sounds like there's a lot of intentionality behind what META is doing.
In reality META has simply not banned or restricted these accounts from monetization. That's it! But that doesn't make for an exciting headline.
Did Meta set up the selection criteria for the automated selection system?
The criteria does not make value judgements about the content of the creator. Unless they are banned or suspended by the entire platform.
No, it's "We invite popular content creators without regard to their political views."
The fact that antisocial (e.g. white nationalist) content creators are the most “popular” (e.g. drive the most engagement) is not immaterial to this topic.
It’s a very flimsy defense. “It’s not my fault that the cartels pay the most for heavy weaponry.”
It’s the new smoking. It’s currently at the stage they profess ignorance while being lambasted with all the videos of them clearly knowing what was going on and lying to congress about it.
I give it a couple years before the PSA about ‘your brain on social media’ or whatever.
They are creating an environment where they incentivize it and profit from it. Whether or not that’s meaningfully different from directly commissioning it themselves seems like a minor quibble to me. It’s no different than a mob boss suggesting a rival should take a long walk off a short pier.
Yes, it says in the article that they are being paid through Meta’s content monetization program. The title is a bit of bait but it’s simply true that rage sells eyeballs so Meta does create an incentive for people to create awful content of many different types.
It sounds like the Twitter/X creator system that was recently curtailed when it didn’t have the expected results. I’m sure the same will happen to Meta’s system, if you pay for raw engagement then you tend to get trash.
Ironically, the article is itself ragebait! But that’s the media as a whole (including Meta).
Headline has now been updated to be less misleading / more boring (rendering prior conversation confusing to newcomers).
They wrote that title specifically to mislead people.
“Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”
—
“I didn’t directly tell them to make white nationalist content, I just paid them for being an engaging content creator.”
—
Hope that we get to a point as a society that we acknowledge that companies can and should be held liable for inevitable second-order effects of the decisions they make and strategies they adopt.
It certainly applies to personal liability, e.g. manslaughter.
Twitter/X has actually paying some of those creators. They're changing that program in September.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2023/07/13/twi...
No, Meta intentionally set up the incentive structure to reward rage bait content. You should expect they knew what they were going to get from doing that.
You don't get to be Meta's size and have Meta's experience with systems engineering and research on their own platform's incentives and outcomes, and not know exactly how this will go.
So does ABC, which is why we are all commenting on their article here.
Yes. This article is just rage bait designed to rile up the type of people that want the government to restrict freedom of speech on social media.
I think it depends on whether what Meta states about the "Content Monetization" program being invite only is true? If it is, that's effectively commissioning, if it's not, well Meta is lying and then the question is why lie?
First, pay people for the "engagement" their content generates, then aggressively promote the most "engaging" content. At the same time, such content is known to have certain characteristics. This is the Facebook (et al.) commissioning model.
Why anyone still engages with these platforms is totally beyond me. They are bad for your soul, bad for the nation, bad for the world.
If I may offer: Because they have become fiendishly adept at exploiting an addictive behaviour/weakness in our brains WHILE masquerading as some sort of social utility (AND perhaps vestigially retaining some semblance of that) - which, incidentally, is what (some) originally might have been, before encrappification.-
I suspect the OP understands this. Since few of those on HN (I am assuming) no longer have a FB presence, the question is why hasn't everyone arrived at this same conclusion and walked away from that addiction?
Meta should really have gone the way of MySpace a long, long time ago.
And/or MySpace should have gone the way of F'book :)
Though I hear it might make a comeback.-
PS. To your point, I am guessing: For one thing it takes the ability to thus conclude, to begin with. THAT, in turn takes intellect and time AND evidence such as has been accruing. AND third, probably, because addictions are by definition hard to quit. ALSO: I think few times in the history of addictive behaviours has the enabling agent had such a low low low entry threshold, such presumptive innocuousness, and such assumed and granted "utility". It began by hijacking human communication, "socialization". It is devious.-
Breaking any type of addiction is hard. For some people it requires intentional and deliberate help from others.
Social media is a habit more than an addiction. It's easy to stop if you engage in other social activities. The trouble for many people who grew up online is that they don't have much experience doing that.
Facebook is intentionally designed to be as addictive as possible. It's not "a habit more than an addiction", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24579498
People may believe they need facebook to maintain their relationships.
People educated in math and probability are actually still prone to gambling addiction and things.
It doesn't matter what your high level brain knows, there is a structure and organization of your brain that only changes on geologic timescales, and that structure has serious, easily attackable flaws.
I like your use of "attackable" (and of flaws, obviously).-
PS. F'book commoditized social interaction to their ends while abusing these attackable surfaces. Kalshi and that ilk have now done away with the whole pretense of communication itself and are abusing the same addiction mechanisms to commoditize OPINION to their ends. Opinions: Everybody has one.-
PS. At some point somebody is going to commoditize mere bodily movement wrapped into such an addictive mechanism and we will get people with "weird" performative "palsies" walking about.-
As many have pointed out, a lot of daily community activities are conducted primarily through Meta-owned platforms. Quite annoying, but maybe there wasn't enough effort earlier to get all these schools and other community groups using other tools to get the word out?
However, companies could en masse decide to start filtering resumes containing Meta employment history. This already happens with some other questionable industries when reviewing applications. I know I'd be hard pressed to hire anyone with a Meta background.
> This already happens with some other questionable industries when reviewing applications. I know I'd be hard pressed to hire anyone with a Meta background.
Nice thought. Sure as heck will consider it now.-
Most people that I know who use it basically only use it for Marketplace and one or two groups. (It would be better to not use it at all, but that seems fine.) Someone showed me their feed and it’s all slop, worse than Twitter.
Many people understand that it’s a waste of time, but people with low impulse control get sucked in. Same as with gambling and Candy Crush style games. And substances, for that matter. This isn’t their fault, some people are wired that way.
We really need a revival of Craigslist to eliminate the Marketplace hold on local P2P commerce.
Exactly. Same reason we eat junk food that also isnt good for us.
i recently downloaded it again after nearly a decade to use marketplace to buy a bike for my wife. Got the bike and deleted the app. but my god opening it up was hell. the interface on mobile is just....stressful. super cluttered, shit all over the place with notifications and things to see. first post i saw on there was someone i used to be friends with but havent thought about in years just blatently reposting ACTUAL racist shit... bought a bike in one day and deleted the app once again. horrible experience aside from the nice old dude who sold me the bike lol
I had a similar experience logging in to FB to delete my account which was inactive for almost a decade. It’s legit was like the movie Idiocracy. Casino vibes, over stimulation, people saying stupid thing, trying to sift through lots of garbage to find the thing you’re looking for.
thats exactly what i was telling my wife, a casino is way more accurate than what i said. i was like it felt like signing on to Temu with all of the shit all over the place
I remember going to Las Vegas once after I turned 21, realizing that it totally wasn’t my thing, and especially being scared by the expressions on the zombie seniors sitting in front of the slot machines shoveling quarters in.
I see that basically every day now with people watching TikTok or Instagram while walking, on the bus, or even driving, barely able to tear their attention away. It’s like a casino except that it’s available 24 hours a day with no limits.
> especially being scared by the expressions on the zombie seniors sitting in front of the slot machines shoveling quarters in.
It's not just seniors.
I used to date a woman who worked as a cocktail waitress on the floor of a major casino on the strip. She referred to the people at the slots as "trained monkeys".
Definitely not just seniors but I saw a bus full of them unload and it was like watching a switch flip off as everyone stopped socializing and focused on the machines. So eerie.
yeah its nuts. ive hard restricted any form of social media to 15 minutes a day combined for the remaining ones i have. its been extremely healthy tbh. ive felt much better in the almost two years ive been doing it!
and i get it! the zombified rapid button pressing over and over. when i went to japan we were stoked to go check out a pachinko hall and we walked in and it was overstimulation city lol. walking in through the front door directly out through the back door haha.
My experience with Instagram too. Signed up to talk to one person who only uses Instagram, and it's just garbage all around.
I think it's a frog boiling situation. Early users got gradually accustomed to the gradually increasing garbage, but anyone who enters the ecosystem now is immediately turned off.
I use Instagram on Android because it's heavily modified and stripped to its bare essentials just for responding to friends. Prior to this I used the web app. If those two disappeared I would be done.
Instagram on Android was caught bypassing OS security requirements by opening a port on localhost, which webpages with Facebook tracking scripts would connect to to get your identity.
at the very least, insta is a semi cleaner and its the content itself thats abrasive... for now... thats the only other thing i use purely to keep up with family and i do photography so its somewhere to share some pics with family and friends.once you spend an entire night flagging everything you dont wanna see it becomes pretty clean. and then i put a 15 min timer on top of it. so it barely gets used but its semi well-tailored lol
I refuse to use facebook on mobile. Website only, and it’s terrible but that’s where the local community is if you need to find a lost dog or deal on a bike.
yup and thats exactly what i discovered. id rather not use it and also not lose any additional respect for people i used to like or have good memories with lol
In my area if you want to join any kind of amateur sports or outdoors group, you have to get on Facebook. If you want to know what musicians are coming to town, you have to get on instagram. Ironically it's usually the young, anti establishment types who tend to have only instagram presence.
Depending on your interests, getting off meta platform may very well result in a net loss of real life activity you can participate.
From what I have heard, Facebook is also the place to rent cheap apartments. The mom and pop landlords are Facebook only. The local Craigslist is dying and scam ridden. Big name rental websites tend to only have listing for pricier, corporate owned rentals.
It's an addiction. These platforms have been engineers to be addictive, and now people are hooked.
It's not like traditional media is any better. At least with social media platforms the means of producing media and building a following has been democratized.
Hard agree, I keep hoping for the day society awakens as a whole to realize what they're doing to us.
I'll help you understand: Important information is many times only found on these platforms. Many local businesses and events only have their info on Facebook or Instagram. Many local community groups are only on Facebook, and you'll find information there that has a real impact on your life (like bus broke down).
The other part is messaging. In parts of Europe nobody uses WhatsApp or SMS to communicate, everybody is on Facebook messenger.
And there's still the old school social media posts: cousin had a baby, friend got married. And also content made for the general public which is not malicious.
Yeah, Instagram is by far the most reliable communications channel from my kid's school, believe it or not. Like, there are mailing lists and portals you can log into, but the IT aspect of actually getting access for even one parent, let alone both, is such a fucking slog for everyone involved (and who knows what bullshit the school has to deal with from their side) that we get info through our WhatsApp group chat from the parents who have Instagram.
Once I overcame the addiction tech, engineered over billions of brilliant-person-hours, atop research into human behavioural prediction and conditioning that’d make the KGB blush?
It’s the hundreds of people on my Facey that I have no other way to contact, and whom I can’t convince to move to e.g. Mastodon, even by offering to do or automate it for them. I suppose I could get an agent to run through the list with a script that gives my phone number to anyone who expresses a wish to remain in touch.
Quora has become a scam and CP-ridden cesspit but there are still some old-timers who can really write, and whom I’ve become somewhat emotionally invested in. And a habit of 13 years is hard to break.
Get their Signal or WhatsApp numbers.
I don't use FB or insta , but here are some reasons why people use it:
- Keep in touch with family
- Comfort from having their ideas reinforced
- Organize small events
- Share pictures easily
- not feel lonely
- stay current on world events
All of those have other routes to accomplish the same thing, but I guess they have the "Dropbox effect" of simplifying it so even techno challenged can use it.
Meta is easier for that stuff, I won't deny. Nevertheless, we've managed to get our families into Signal groups that largely accomplish the same things at the scale we need. And the benefits of not needing to wade through slop make up for the losses. It's so peaceful! Hopefully more people give it a try.
If you want to "make it" as an artist / restaurateur / musician / million other things you kind of have to.
Hell, the most reliable communication channel for getting information from my kid's school is Instagram.
Everyone needs their daily dose of outrage. Tell me – why are you here on HN interacting with this very post?
I'm not sure if you're talking about Meta platforms or social media in general. It's been years since I've used any Meta platform but I'm a daily user of Tiktok.
On Tiktok I don't think the platform is paying people to rage bait, at least not directly. But wannabe influencers will still try and rage bait their way into a viral video and hopefully a following. To me it's entirely transparent and I just move on but people fall for it. Lots of people. Gender wars is easy pickings. A good example was the $3 cheese surcharge on a burger. I knew immediately that was fake and it was later confirmed [1].
But why am I on Tiktok? Because there's actually some good stuff on there and just some plain entertaining stuff. But what really seals it is the comments. Therea re a ton of videos where the comments are the best part. There are some funny people out there. And Tiktok more than any other platform I've experienced seems to surface such comments.
But I could best describe Facebook as your racist uncle posting conspiracy theories and that's pretty much it.
[1]: https://www.bonappetit.com/story/tiktok-3-dollar-burger-chee...
> Why anyone still engages with these platforms is totally beyond me.
Because it provides a form entertainment, low hanging entertainment. All designed to grip you in your weakest fronts.
Map out what triggers a person visually. Feed it in to a LLM model and on the evil scale, you can start exploiting those who get angry based on whatever content.
Anger is one of the easiest trigger points in form of media. Broadcast a opposite view of an individual or a group. Downvotes and Upvotes are the primitive form of this and if you lack the emotional intelligence (thick skin) to handle the flack, you end up turning on emotions.
Because they influence a lot of opinions which influences decisions which ends up influencing all our lives. Back around 2016 bots were loose on ut internet, with everyone freely gobbling up misinformation. Now there is an unofficial army of people determined to keep facts up at the forefront as well as other malicious social media negative trends at bay.
As well as several official armies determined to keep disinformation at the forefront while keeping facts at bay.
So is meth, but it’s as popular as ever.
I will call out the ABC here for taking a lot of the boots on the ground work that Tom Tanuki - independent journo (https://youtube.com/@tomtanuki) has done with these far right slopaganda mills, slicing off the prior recognition and pretending it's a big new problem they just found. While a bit of this is new... Is it that new? Is this report that detailed? Hmmmmm
Well, they claim they've done their own independent investigations, maybe started because of that bloggers/vloggers work, but still could be independent. What exactly is pointing towards it not being independent? It seems to be a detailed enough account of why the people break Facebook's own guidelines, yet receive money from Facebook.
Last Week Tonight has also done multiple bits on this topic over the years, with one during the current season with list of prior offenses.
Facebook is still big in my country, Lithuania, and both rage-bait and other type of fringe content is rampant, and even worse after fact-checking was removed. It is wild, and with some outside actors (specific country that shall not be named) it is a big problem with political and social effects being felt IRL.
And is Lithuania doing anything about it? In Romania Facebook and TikTok do whatever they please, and whatever they are paid to do, with complete impunity as the authorities actively do nothing at all.
Our police has a page called "Virtual Police Patrol" which allows reporting of these cases. Some of the worst trolls have been prosecuted and sentenced. But we're not doing much regarding Facebook itself, just cleaning up with the results of it.
Recent Guardian article:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49237298This isn't anything new, it was abundantly clear after Facebook removed their fact checking team during covid that the priority was engagement over everything else, and rage bait is exactly that.
I just want to add, that they (FB and other big social media) probably understood what propaganda power they wield after 2016 facebook and cambridge analytica scandal.
Personally - I think that this was the moment when silicon valley billionaires without shadow of a doubt understood that they have power what used to be reserved only for state actors. Bonus - for using that power they get fined penny on the dollar at most or just slap on the wrist.
Update: now situation is even worse - states actively buy propaganda with social media companies, making those companies even more rich and influential.
COVID-era “fact checking” went way beyond its remit and started to become a political tool. This had negative consequences for the average person’s trust in institutions of all kinds, because people really don’t like it when you attempt to police their individual political speech, even if it’s clearly inaccurate (as it so often is). It’s a good thing that it was removed.
The problem with Meta is the monetization and engagement model, not the lack of fact checking.
> because people really don’t like it when you attempt to police their individual political speech
I'm not sure that I buy that when people's health are at stake. When things are objectively false, and spreading that information will actively harm people, you have a responsibility and duty of care to point out falsities. But that's just me.
It isn’t just you, but it also isn’t everybody. Dissent is always present, and the 1st amendment ensures that people have the right to speak their mind. Having the government lean on private platforms to pressure them into censorship, especially in a coordinated fashion, violates that right. Even if the government attempts to launder that pressure through a maze of domestic and foreign NGOs.
Sorry your COVID misinformation was removed and your president actually lost the 2020 election.
Lol. “My president”. As if.
This attitude you have is why we’re in a race to the bottom politically. I hope you live to see the fruits of your efforts, fully.
> "it is not Meta's role to police offensiveness"
Just to fund, transmit, amplify, protect, and profit from it.
And of course publish it.
Logically we might expect Meta to get into selling narcotics next.
"It is not Meta's role to police drug use"
It runs that global marketplace enabling this kind of trade per their internal 2024 documents quoted in the following article:
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
“Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.”
Meta has already been okay with drug use by allowing people to place ads and other posts clearly promoting drug use/sales. IIRC, 404 Media did an article on this
What's the latest social media platform position on being labeled a publisher? Aren't they against that?
The constitution guarantees free speech, but not free drug use (though maybe it should). So I don't see any contradiction here. Meta has every right to police speech as it is a private company, but it has no obligation to do so.
I don't think the issue here is whether FaceBook is acting illegally, but whether it is acting responsibly, or just enshittifying society for it's own benefit.
Note incidentally that "free speech" doesn't mean you can say what you like. Yes, you can go out in public and swear and engage in hate speech - all legal - but for example you can't incite others to commit crimes, cross over into disorderly conduct, shout "fire" in a theater, etc.
The egregious part is the amplification part. Profit derives from that. Transmission and protection are neutral and they are necessary for all information especially if there is a history of freedom of expression; though of course some governments and others like regulating permissible expression.
Don't forget the politics too behind it:
- Facebook and Genocide: How Facebook contributed to genocide in Myanmar and why it will not be held accountable - https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho...
- UN: Facebook had a ‘role’ in Rohingya genocide - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/3/13/un-facebook-had-a-r...
- Rohingya refugees sue Facebook over genocide - https://www.dw.com/en/rohingya-refugees-file-lawsuit-against...
Facebook is doing that in India as well. They are becoming Government Lap dog and do as its comfortable to their profits. Government of India able to suppress many dissent in recent years because of social media suppression. BTW Current government control News Channels by other means, we have term for Indian news channel as Godi Media. "Godi" in hindi literally means lap.
And Gaza:
- https://www.thecanary.co/global/world-analysis/2024/12/20/fa...
- https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240921-big-techs-complic...
- https://progressive.international/wire/2025-08-26-un-calls-o...
Transmission and protection are not neutral. They're a choice. Facebook has freedom of association and is allowed not to host content they believe harmful. Something they already do extensively. [1]
[1] https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/
They are a choice, yes, the same way anything is. They are neutral choices in the same way roads and other infrastructure "permitting" criminals to use them are. The fact that Meta does not choose to be neutral in all such cases is not an argument against that.
It's more like explicitly building infra for criminals.
Yes, but that is perfectly ok because we live in a society with not only freedom of speech but also freedom of the press, so it necessarily follows that it is ok to distribute speech that you don't like to a willing audience and also to profit from it. If that isn't ok, then neither is HN or the New York Times.
"Legal" and "perfectly okay" (aka socially acceptable or virtuous in some other way) are different things. If HN started paying people to post socially divisive content that wouldn't be okay at all (though it would almost certainly be legal).
Zuck was gagging for the Trump 2nd term so he could go all in on this shit. Slow clap for the Meta employees that enable it.
How do you feel about bookstores stocking titles like "Steal This Book"? What about libraries?
Have you ever read it? It was published in _1970_ and the content isn't really about stealing books, but about fighting against the government and corporations. Its more political commentary than anything else.
Yes, bookstores should stock it, and libraries should shelve it. Its something everybody should read at least once, for some perspective at least.
Just to add onto this; Instagram purposely floats controversial comments to the top of a comment section for "engagement" purposes. I've seen this many times.
I've noticed that when my partner and I look at the same Instagram post (within a few minutes of each other), we get completely different "top" comments. I suspect Instagram is ordering the comments individually for each user to maximize engagement.
All social media is drifting towards being a mirror that reflects your worst tendencies back at you. No content restrictions will fix this - the whole personalized approach to media is fundamentally rotten.
Facebook figured out a long time ago that "ragebait" and profit are transitively connected via "engagement". They recognized that anger, hate, fear, and all negative emotions can ALSO bring in a LOT of clicks.
This is true of every social media that operates around engagement. Reddit, twitter, tiktok, etc. the model failed in every way except for making money. Hell, it's true of hacker news sometimes!
This sucks, I feel like most people are so done with rage bait content but it's what the platforms have proven makes the most money. At this point it would take a new platform with a different paradigm to get people to stop but also no one wants a new app to keep track of.
FB is built on rage bait, what else do they have beside cute videos?
Horrible sympathy and religion bait like "I bet nobody will upvote this poor sick child with one leg, won't you? 1 amen = 1 prayer!"
The algorithms do love a loneliness influencer https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jun/08/loneliness-i...
Unfortunately things like craigslist died off and moved to Facebook marketplace somehow. I have to ask my wife to post things for me.
Marketplace. It’s pretty good that’s my main usage of Facebook nowadays
If you use the friends or "all" feeds, you just get stuff about what your friends are up to and things from pages you've subscribed to. Or I do anyway. Also good for discovering events locally.
Even the main feed isn't that bad for me. I guess it depends who your friends are and what you click on.
I removed all friends years ago. After I read about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, I quit, but I still need an account for a few groups I moderate.
I think it has done more damage to this country than tobacco.
Connecting with your friends and family. Unfortunately they abandoned this long ago because they weren't satisfied with making a mountain of money.
I use FB for genealogy, because there are a lot of local groups where people post historical pictures, and older people in general are more active on Facebook.
I've seen some local groups taken over by ragebait slop, though. Ironically, not even right wing rage bait slop. As far as I can tell, it finally boiled over for the admin of the page, who was a fairly liberal guy in an extremely rural place, when a local museum found out he was anti-Trump and stopped collaborating with him on local history (maybe for fear of other's reactions). Since then he's strictly reposted rage material from other places/people on Facebook, much of it clearly low effort/AI generated.
I can't judge him, he lives there after all, and from this side of the ocean my political sympathies are definitively closer to him than to his enemies. Still :/
Its time to boycott all meta products. Delete whatsapp, insta, facebook.
I'm not surprised, I quit because I kept getting pushed this content for a long while and suspected as much. Same is happening on nextdoor for sure, whenever I login there's some pushed post that creates a bunch of engagement of someone stating something very political and controversial. It almost feels funny how bluesky and other platforms lack this sorta rage bait being prioritized. Facebook and friends sold us out hard and made society suffer. Stop using their services.
Every other day, my feed seems to be filled with pro-Republican posts, followed by pro-Democratic posts the next. It’s fascinating how the model decided this was the kind of content worth generating.
To some degree I think social media algorithms already altered our behavior enough that extreme and controversial content generation would continue even if we disabled the algorithms. They've reinforced the memes enough now that they are self-sustaining.
"The Model" didn't decide anything. Facebook and these other attention economy companies have been A/B testing for two decades now, and there have been multiple "Metas" they have found. They have all converged eventually on ragebait being an extremely effective engagement driver.
They didn't just run a linear regression or whatever on some data and magically get the most rage inducing system. They made conscious decisions at nearly every step to make changes to optimize for "Engagement", which at this point is a code word that means "Controversial" the same way that a video of someone eating a toddler would be "Controversial"
It's digital crack pointed at a subsection of our brain that evolved to do group signalling.
Meta and its products are a cancer.
I would drop Facebook in a heartbeat but Facebook Marketplace is a strong pull for getting bargains in my local area.
I have alternatives like eBay and Gumtree but they have their own shortcomings.
Examples from Facebook:
- Antique lumber planks 50p a plank
- 4 sticks of DDR4 16GB SODIMMs, £60
- Garden tools, £10
This stuff would be slower and more expensive on eBay, and Gumtree is more of a waiting game as its userbase has definitely shrunk.
For some reason I always get insane deals locally on Marketplace. Bought a brand new 3DS with 4 games this weekend 5 kms away from me for ~50€. People would sell this for 200€ on eBay.
I have a dedicated profile for marketplace. I managed to keep it separate from my real meta account for a long time but they eventually tricked me into linking it. We need a Wikipedia model online marketplace. Craigslist was close, but didn’t keep up.
Misleading headline, nontheless it paints a bleak picture for facebook's revenue if they need to resort to these practices.
Every single time historically we have unregulated media you get a shitshow. I think you can blame our societies nonchalant lassez faire attitude to the propaganda profiteering by American big tech for lots of the issues we face today. Honestly: do cocaine laced recommender algorithms really benefit us? I really hope the EU fully bans this stuff.
That used to be called "yellow journalism" in America (and "tabloid journalism" in the UK) which led to the Spanish American war in 1898.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish%E2%80%93American_War
My country has had totally unregulated media for 250 years. I'm not sure what other historical examples you have to justify your moral panic, and I understand that more authoritarian societies will struggle with such an approach but I assure you that we have been doing just fine in spite of the occasional chaos.
“Unregulated media.” LOL.
Care to elaborate? You don’t think the creator of “You should self harm: the TV show” would’ve been regulated and held accountable for the detrimental consequences back in the day? Not saying it was perfect back then, but today I do think internet media companies are out of control.
We had “regulated media” before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hays_Code. Do you trust people to regulate your media? I don’t.
Uh, the Hays Code is actually a premier example of "Industry Self regulation", as well as it's replacement, the equally absurd and incestuous MPAA ratings system.
It's the exact "Industries have an incentive to self regulate" talking point that conservatives have long used to say industries should be less regulated
And you are pointing to it as an example that we shouldn't use the government to regulate media.
Meanwhile, I think the FCC does a pretty good job, where their regulatory bar is "You cannot blast boobs or these swears over the public wireless spectrum, everything else is fair game", including an entire TV channel called "Fox News" which has had to argue in court on at least one occasion that nobody would assume any program on "Fox News" was news, rather than entertainment.
Right, cos we know that it's regulated - Elon rules X/Twitter, Mark rules Facebook, and shareholder value rules the others. In fact it's even more regulated now because Donald rules over them.
But regulated media is also a shit show!
You just need accountable media.
Torture or murder on a live Facebook stream? You hold Facebook accountable.
Like what?
Take a juicy corruption story to the media and watch them refuse to engage. All of them.
There are things they are allowed to talk about, and things they are not.
It’s been refined over many decades to maintain public ignorance
That Epstein or Enron type scandal you see in the media is tip of iceberg of what is not published.
Pravda is the most famous example
UK “D-notices” are another great example
And the Sedition Act, as well as the Comstock Act
Aren't the UK's D-notices advisory. I thought they could be (and often are) ignored by media outlets. I don't think they warrant a mention alongside Pravda.
True, I suppose UK “super injunctions” would be more apt, although the D-notice system has been used multiple times to successfully prevent information from reaching the public.
The companies clearly won’t listen to reason, not as long as this strategy works.
Voting seems to work, either with actual votes, or wallet, or attention.
Ragebait is what FB runs on. A lot of these people do not even believe what they say. https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-11-16/kin...
FB and IG reels both. Twitter gets a lot of rightfully owed criticism about it's fair share but its always weird to me seeing people slam twitter then go right on to IG or some other meta owned app as if its significantly different.
I'm so glad I got myself off Instagram and Reddit, the longer I go without them the more I realise what massive cognitohazards both of them are if you spend too much time on them. Different mechanisms but both were much more of a net drain on me than I realised before leaving them.
I use both IG and Twitter. IG reels for me are largely funny videos, stuff I follow, and stuff I'm interested in. On Twitter I only follow tech stuff and yet about 20% of the stuff in my 'recommended' feed is racist, violent, and stuff I have zero interest in. Even if you hit the 'non interested' button they continue to shove it down your throat.
Is it ethical wrong in this case, to wish those persons to get beaten up one day, by one of the people where they fueled their hate (who do take it out on other people for real)? So they reap what they sow?
Understandable but wrong.
Wishing for something doesn't make it happen. So we should consider the effect that this wishing has on you: does wishing for vengeance make you a worse, or better, person? I'd try to avoid it, myself.
If you're in a position where you're actually making the decision between letting these harmful practices continue, or putting a stop to them, that's different. But in this society, such people are more likely to be journalists and justices than vigilantes, so violence is still inappropriate. I think the scenario you described, of those incited to violence turning on the inciters with violence, is rather unlikely in reality, and it wouldn't necessarily be a good thing.
There is no solution based on censorship that doesn't undermine democracy. If you want Facebook to censor people/content/ideas that you don't like it is going also to censor vital information needed for a democracy to work.
The best solution for now seams to be what twitter is doing with community notes.
You don't have to censor, but you don't have to pay either
Not paying is a form of censorship.
Click on it, read the image title, that's all you need to know and the correct title here.
I stopped logging into Faecebook, years ago, because it marked most of my posts as spam (I tended to post "look at my latest" stuff, there, so I understand why; but it rendered the platform worthless, for me).
However, I'll lay odds that if I had posted that Hitler was just a misunderstood genius, my posts would have gone viral throughout the system.
I have a very mixed friend group from hard left and hard right and they all get their own little bubble of rage bait that amplifies their own beliefs. Since i have them in my feed I get this crap from both side in my feed thanks to the algorithms. So i barely touch the site anymore
Especially before elections, it feels like they rewards people for being toxic
Can't they just do it with AI ?
Probably training the rage-bait edition of their AI so they can generate future "content" themselves.
I hate that I've become jaded enough to say this, but what else is new?
Newspapers and also pay people to produce rage-bait content.
I don't know anyone who uses Facebook anymore
This is a tired rehash of the same panic we had after 2016. In short: “Oh no, if we allow unrestricted communications, people may turn this into political advantage!” No shit. That’s the point of free speech.
As always, the only solution is twofold: (1) end the targeted advertising business model (for everyone, not just Meta) and (2) acknowledge and address the underlying social and economic problems affecting average people. But of course the establishment has no interest in pursuing either one of these. And so popular anger will continue to build.
I’m sure that shutting down the few release valves for that anger is a great solution.
It's not a release valve, it's a honeypot so the 99% keep blaming each other. Shut it down and something might actually happen in the real world.
This is a really funny way to describe Facebook's (and Youtube's, and TikTok's, and...) entire business model. It's long been known that they aggressively promote ahem "engaging" content. How do they incentivize people to make it? Ad revenue!
Maybe they should pay their programmers to fix the audio bug in their iOS app. I can't listen to my podcasts and use the facebook app at the same time because it wants to mute the podcast to play nothing, even with the phone on silent and autoplay disabled the facebook app just randomly mutes my podcasts for no reason making me not want to use the app.
Social media platforms have been paying out for attention seeking behaviour for a long time now. It’s why every YouTube video now has the same lame shocked face, red arrows, and clickbait title. It’s why assholes film themselves intentionally pissing people off for TikTok. It’s a whole category called nuisance tubing.
I remember during COVID I saw a number of YouTubers swing from producing normal content into conspiracy shit. Their views ballooned. I saw a nasty feedback loop where the more controversial content received more engagement, hence more ad revenue, leading to more of it being produced.
These platforms are actively degenerating society; there’s a reason the CCP is keeping tight control and reportedly rebalancing things to promote educational creators on China’s.
Indeed. What I noticed is that the quality of the videos went down on youtube in the last 3 years. Now, the quality was never as great as it used to be anyway, but Google changed various things that made youtube worse. They are slowly killing off youtube without realising it.
A lot of channels got bought by private equity. YouTube is saturated with similar content so creators have to resort to clickbait to keep up. AI has allowed creators to increase their efficiency writing scripts.
I don't know what you believe Google changed about YouTube, but I believe it has just made itself worse.
It's difficult for me to understand what people are getting out of the youtube experience, as I'm pretty straight up intolerant of most of the traits of this kind of content - all I hear recently from the neighbours kid's tablets and phones is loads of stuff with too-fast too-intense mono-tone TTS.
Such a shame that people take up against AI, rather than the people selecting and serving them slop.
CCP is keeping tight control over social media platforms first and foremost to prevent spreading information which could topple CCP.
"Last month 60 popular celebrity gossip sites were closed overnight for corrupting "core socialist values," and a new regulation released in May requires all online news portals to be managed by Communist Party-sanctioned editorial staff."
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-40896235
It also has a lot of other side effects. One of them seems to be a more stable, prosperous society. I don't like that a totalitarian dictatorship is more stable and prosperous than us, maybe we should fix that?
No, they actually do have a paternalistic drive to keep things healthy and pro-social above and beyond some Bond villain stuff.
I mean, yes, you also can't get away with organizing an opposition, but they really do care about social cohesion and good family values above and beyond that.
(Also, one should always note that the BBC is state owned when they write articles full of invective like this).
The priorities of CCP are suppressing opposition first and social cohesion and good family values second. If you don't like state owned BBC, you can read for example non-state owned Guardian about the state of Chinese media landscape.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/dec/15/jimmy-lai...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/22/hong-kong-auth...
I respect the BBC's independence actually, I don't think they're meaningfully worse than CNN. It's just a funny detail that they completely gloss over their own status while saying "communist party media" this and that.
The Chinese media landscape doesn't support anti-Chinese narratives and the US/UK media landscape, while totally free, somehow never produces anti-Anglo narratives[1]. It's not a conspiracy, it's a culture.
[1]: There are safe anti-anglo narratives where various defeated/killed people have a valid grievance and we should all cry about it, as long as they're all dead and a non-threat.
Your first paragraph and second contradict each other somewhat. Celebrity gossip sites are not likely to threaten the party. On the contrary they may well work as "opium for the people", or circus with the bread, to keep dissent down.
The party doesn't actually need "core socialist values" to stay in charge. They could easily have adopted a Putin (or Napoleon, or Caesar) attitude of "I don't give a damn about the framework legitimizing my rule, as long as you acknowledge me as the boss".
Maybe keeping the CCP in power and society not degenerating are correlated?
They did oversee an unprecedented rise in living standards and global influence after all...
Maybe those core socialist values were what enabled it?
People want to feel like they're doing something in the "culture war". Rage-bait gives them an outlet. Facebook might be saving us from total civil war here.
Rage-bait invented the "culture war" you're talking about.
Clickbait. Title makes it sound like they pay them directly to promote the platform, but they get paid through facebook content monetisation program
Not Clickbait.
If you provide both:
a) a service to earn money from content
b) an algo promoting those videos
then yes, IMHO they pay them directly for the content produced.
There is a distinction between:
- Meta is commissioning or sponsoring rage-bait
- Controversial creators are earning money through Facebook's content monetization program
The title is ambiguous (at first, I thought it was the first case), and that's where the clickbait lies.
No doubt that also the second case is a serious problem, but that's orthogonal to the ambiguity of the title.
The distinction disappears when Facebook incentivizes the creation of the rage-bait content by prioritizing it in their algorithm. They can, at any moment, de-rank rage-bait, but they don't. That clearly signals "make rage-bait for our platform and we'll pay you."
Contrast it with something like Elsagate. Google actioned the offending creators and attempted to deprioritize the kind of content that caused the controversy. Facebook would do the same if they didn't condone rage-bait.
>They can, at any moment, de-rank rage-bait, but they don't. That clearly signals "make rage-bait for our platform and we'll pay you."
They don't because they don't select for it. They disporotionally push engagement but as far as I know don't have some indians or AI working tirelessly analysing countless videos to categorise them and rank them according to how ragebaity or controversial they are. Those things just rise to the top out of their effort to drive engagement and screentime.
Any alternative that does the same will end up with similar result.
I find it hard to believe that Facebook's feed is "dumb" and only promotes what's engaging the most users. They serve you content that they think you will find engaging, and there has to be some automatic categorization as a result.
And regardless, even if they don't select for rage-bait, they still refuse to take action against accounts that repeatedly post it, making your interjection largely pointless.
It's not dumb and promotes what's engaging for users individually algoritmically without categorising. That's the not dumb part about it.
>They serve you content that they think you will find engaging, and there has to be some automatic categorization as a result.
And this can be completely smart or dumb depending on how you look at it. From my perspective it's a smart algorithm still. If you like or comment on far right or far left ragebait or just ragebait in general then it can serve you ouput from accounts who attract engagement from others who also engage witht hat video. Aka similarly minded people get similarly minded content semi organically as a result of optimising for engagement.
It can do so without genuenly knowing that the video is of category xyz and promoting that specific category but automatically it detects that people who engage with video y are also more likely to engage with video z. The ideological and engagement type bubbles create themselves as a result.
>even if they don't select for rage-bait, they still refuse to take action against accounts that repeatedly post it, making your interjection largely pointless.
The definition of ragebait is vague. Your supressing ragebait is another person's ragebait or supressing of desimination of societal issues. It can be a video of violent crime or of political corruption. Of war or religious extremism. It can be sharing statistics, supporting misogynistic or xyzfobic talkingpoints or exposing them, etc
In a society facing economic decline, corruption or cultural upheaval or what have you you will be stepping on toes whichever way you go. I'd say it's better to either outright ban this kind of social media which will be deeply unpopular or to focus wholely on tackling the divisive issues that lead people to be attracted to some of the dominant topics.
"an invitation-only programme that lets you earn money from the performance of your eligible public reels, photos, stories and text posts." implies this is only available to a subset of people?
So they do directly pay them?
Just to be clear, I was not enraged by this headline when I desperately clicked on it as fast as I could. It was out of pure scholarly interest.
Ironically, this article is rage-bait.
We've become a provocateur type of society... Lady Gaga, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Mr. Beast, Jake/Logan Paul... it's all the same thing at the end of the day. They harvest attention and in return funnel their audience towards ads, merch, OnlyFans, etc.
they are paying Nazis to make Nazi content.
You can't say that here.
First of all, Facebook is not even the worst offender. That'd have to go to X and TikTok. Rage bait, propaganda, and straight up bad actors with money pushing their agenda. If you got angry because of a TikTok video, you are being exploited.
Some of these actors also put a lot of money into campuses in the west, so when you're done watching some terrible propaganda, you can join a local club and find your way to more people getting angry at misinformation. This is how we get stuff like "globalize intifada" and students "occupying" buildings.
I wish this was just hyperbole, but really, go check for yourself what kind of money state actors put into schools and universities in the west, and why.
This is how we also get stuff like Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_pet-eating_hoax
When will people learn that rage bait content thrives thanks to people who are so delicate and emotional that they get unhealthily enraged at such content?
Stop raging on the internet and the rage bait content will disappear overnight.
Stop buying oil, chasing newest phones, luxuries, and the climate will get better overnight.
It’s all on the consumers, contrary to Redditor belief that the big corporations are at fault, it’s simply the matter of demand and thus supply. Not the other way around.
Take accountability. I know nowadays it is very unpopular to take accountability but this is the first step to make world better place. You can only change your own habits.
> You can only change your own habits
Rather like smoking, I can only change my own habits (have never smoked) but that won't prevent me from being harmed by other people's habits.
Even if I don't use Facebook, I can be harmed by Facebook voters.
Any solution that requires individuals to “just” do something that’s contrary to their nature is not a solution.
No society has ever solved a serious problem by “just” doing something on an individual scale en masse.
Think about what you’re suggesting. Individual action that acts like coordinated action. It’s impossible at scale. It’s a total contradiction.
(This is not even touching on the fact that the vast majority of oil use and pollution comes from military, energy, and industrial uses, not individual consumers.)
This does not imply that every problem can or even should be solved, but you’re not going to solve it this way.
Out of interest, would you have made this argument with respect to Big Tobacco back in the day? In my view surveillance-based behavioural recommendation engines belong very much in the same category.
I would say that initiative to combat big tobacco didn’t emerge out of some bored statesman.
It was what people voted for and endorsed, one way or another. Grassroots activists and various bottom top endeavours.
If you expect somebody else to solve your problems then nothing will ever happen.
Meta could help the situation, for instance by providing fact-checking tools and banning rage-bait creators.
Instead they have removed those tools and are paying these creators. So it's not just consumers to blame here.
Well, you use their platform and thus line their pockets. Why? Because it’s convenient, it’s lazy and “free” and you sold your soul and data for far too cheap.
If the population cannot behave in their best interest then the whole western civ gets Darwin Award and I am fine with that honestly.
And it is actually happening in real time in almost all categories from fertility rate to losing psychological warfare.
But we don't all use Facebook, Facebook found its niche of tech-illiterate people to abuse.
The population is a wide demographic and it would be nice if companies didn't try to exploit parts of it.
You can say a lot of words on any given topic on a niche technology board but what does that change?
What can you do to change this situation? If there is a want then there are opportunities to make a difference.
Look, I don’t expect everyone to go into politics or become some kind of chief activist but I would love for people to be more aware of their collective strength and power.
To dispel the too pervasive illusion of powerlessness and false narrative (I wonder where that came from btw) about lack of agency.
Today’s divisions (I wonder where that came from) make it harder to group up with people when everyone is so split and radical and polarised (I wonder where that came from)
Look, I may make a lot of quite fervent comments on this site a lot of the times but it is just because I see 24/7 how we are getting tricked into less and less personal freedoms.
It’s not a fun thing to observe
I'm not holding my breath for masses to become informed, rational, responsible and balanced overall.
And why would the responsibility lie solely on consumers to act perfectly
Meta have long profited from knowingly aiding and abetting the enemies of the West by undermining our societies from within.
Meta are the greatest force against freedom in the world today, apart from Putin's post-fascist power vertical and the Chinese Communist Party.
What I think of Mark Zuckerberg unfortunately cannot be printed, because unlike Meta platforms, HN has standards.
Now people understand why Suckerberg is called Suckerberg.
Those greedy billionaires also keep on having ties to right wing nuts. Let's not forget Melon Usk with his suspicious right-arm-raising gestures (having done so twice, which is quite strange when you do the same gesture twice in a row - I mean there can be no doubt about this if you do it twice; twice is an accident?).
It is not only rage bait. They like the new corporate fascism and that its followers believe that the right wing will fix the economy.
Maybe they have some romantic ideals about the 1930s, where Schacht fixed the economy for Hitler with a form of quantitative easing. But that scheme became unsustainable around 1938.
The difference is that back then the powerful needed people. The current Silicon Valley "elites" want to get rid of everyone, make them dumb and replace them with AI.
The sooner the right wing audience realizes this, the better.
Why do the richest and most powerful humans, who have seen all of the world and its wonders, and can go anywhere anytime, and get all the luxuries our civilization has to offer, and never have to struggle for anything in their lives..
want to make it worse?
Because, often, that's how they became the richest, most powerful humans. If your goal is to have money and power, and you have more today than yesterday, the world for you didn't get worse.
After a point what difference does it make?
When you literally have a billion dollars what difference does 1 million more make?
Just your common dick-measuring contest at a different echelon. When all people are NPCs to be exploited, getting the highest score is the goal.
Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtV33YSKOJk
"Mega-billionaire can't relate to his millionaire friends" - Wizards with Guns
My ragebait good. Your ragebait bad.
Entire public Meta suite of products are cancer to the society.
If we were normal society company like Meta would be shut down and its CEO would be in Hague and prosecuted for crimes against humanity
If we were normal society companies like Meta would be shut down before their CEO could commit crimes against humanities
when facebook started out and was actual social network, for a short period of time it was arguably a net-positive for the society though…
Similarly, Meta is paying violent illegal israeli settlers, who commit attrocities against Palestinians in the West Bank in order to steal their land. Same mechanism.
https://www.facebook.com/jewishvoiceforpeace/posts/meta-does...
The irony here is that ABC is the platfrom doing the rage-baiting.
Social network is a cancer. I don't even talk to people who use these networks.
How is this any different than traditional media? Cable news creates fake problems and controversy constantly, and pay their news anchors well to do so.
In return, many companies that rely on these problems, turn around and advertise on these networks.
Social media is just following the same strategy.
What are you trying to say? That Facebook should be excused because others also behave badly?
Otherwise, we can dislike both things and it adds nothing to say "but why aren't your talking about the other thing instead". And for what it's worth, there is a pretty clear difference between the journalistic standards of FB bait and of the legacy media.
Social media has been protected by the Safe Harbour rules because they had millions of users creating content which was difficult to monitor and moderate.
If they start producing their own content they might get considered like a news organisation with a whole different set of rules being applied to them and Safe Harbour being inapplicable.
Safe Harbor should never have been a thing. Newspapers and other publications accepted "user content" without any safe harbor -- and they exercised judgement over what they would publish. If a reader sent in an obscene rant as a letter to the editor, it wouldn't make it any further than the nearest bin.
If an online platform can't figure out how to do that, it's really their problem to solve, not one they should just get to shove on society with some lectures about "parenting" or other nonesense.
One big difference is regulation and algorithms. All viewers/readers see the same content in traditional media, and they’re all subject to scrutiny by government regulators (however effective or not they may be).
Social media networks display different things to different people so it’s borderline impossible to know exactly what they’re even showing. That makes regulation extremely difficult.
More broadly, this perspective depresses me. I’m old enough to remember the promise of the internet when we first all got it: that it would democratise information and we’d be able to break free of the issues with traditional media. Fast forward to today and we’re asking “why shouldn’t the tech giants monetise hate speech?”. How far we’ve fallen.
With social media you can spend small amounts of money , create media and target people half across the globe from you.
ruzzian troll farm employee cannot call into fox news and say “create 100 John Does impersonating MAGA texans (or whatever), present them as real and I will pay you 5$ for that”. Such troll can automate all this and present media somewhat realistically on FB.
> How is this any different than traditional media?
Scale, lower entry bar, lack of regulation.
Sure, and Ebola and influenza share traits too. I’m not sure that makes them interchangeable though.
>> How is this any different than traditional media?
Facebook is global. Traditional media is much more heavily regulated in some countries and while it may not be perfect, it's not comparable to the shit show that is social media.