By Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman
A Facebook Inc. team had a blunt message for senior executives.
The company's algorithms weren't bringing people together. They
were driving people apart.
"Our algorithms exploit the human brain's attraction to
divisiveness," read a slide from a 2018 presentation. "If left
unchecked," it warned, Facebook would feed users "more and more
divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase
time on the platform."
That presentation went to the heart of a question dogging
Facebook almost since its founding: Does its platform aggravate
polarization and tribal behavior?
The answer it found, in some cases, was yes.
Facebook had kicked off an internal effort to understand how its
platform shaped user behavior and how the company might address
potential harms. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg had in public and
private expressed concern about "sensationalism and
polarization."
But in the end, Facebook's interest was fleeting. Mr. Zuckerberg
and other senior executives largely shelved the basic research,
according to previously unreported internal documents and people
familiar with the effort, and weakened or blocked efforts to apply
its conclusions to Facebook products.
Facebook policy chief Joel Kaplan, who played a central role in
vetting proposed changes, argued at the time that efforts to make
conversations on the platform more civil were "paternalistic," said
people familiar with his comments.
Another concern, they and others said, was that some proposed
changes would have disproportionately affected conservative users
and publishers, at a time when the company faced accusations from
the right of political bias.
Facebook revealed few details about the effort and has divulged
little about what became of it. In 2020, the questions the effort
sought to address are even more acute, as a charged presidential
election looms and Facebook has been a conduit for conspiracy
theories and partisan sparring about the coronavirus pandemic.
In essence, Facebook is under fire for making the world more
divided. Many of its own experts appeared to agree -- and to
believe Facebook could mitigate many of the problems. The company
chose not to.
Mr. Kaplan in a recent interview said he and other executives
had approved certain changes meant to improve civic discussion. In
other cases where proposals were blocked, he said, he was trying to
"instill some discipline, rigor and responsibility into the
process" as he vetted the effectiveness and potential unintended
consequences of changes to how the platform operated.
Internally, the vetting process earned a nickname: "Eat Your
Veggies."
Americans were drifting apart on fundamental societal issues
well before the creation of social media, decades of Pew Research
Center surveys have shown. But 60% of Americans think the country's
biggest tech companies are helping further divide the country,
while only 11% believe they are uniting it, according to a
Gallup-Knight survey in March.
At Facebook, "There was this soul-searching period after 2016
that seemed to me this period of really sincere, 'Oh man, what if
we really did mess up the world?' " said Eli Pariser, co-director
of Civic Signals, a project that aims to build healthier digital
spaces, and who has spoken to Facebook officials about
polarization.
Mr. Pariser said that started to change after March 2018, when
Facebook got in hot water after disclosing that Cambridge
Analytica, the political-analytics startup, improperly obtained
Facebook data about tens of millions of people. The shift has
gained momentum since, he said: "The internal pendulum swung really
hard to 'the media hates us no matter what we do, so let's just
batten down the hatches.' "
In a sign of how far the company has moved, Mr. Zuckerberg in
January said he would stand up "against those who say that new
types of communities forming on social media are dividing us."
People who have heard him speak privately said he argues social
media bears little responsibility for polarization.
He argues the platform is in fact a guardian of free speech,
even when the content is objectionable -- a position that drove
Facebook's decision not to fact-check political advertising ahead
of the 2020 election.
'Integrity Teams'
Facebook launched its research on divisive content and behavior
at a moment when it was grappling with whether its mission to
"connect the world" was good for society.
Fixing the polarization problem would be difficult, requiring
Facebook to rethink some of its core products. Most notably, the
project forced Facebook to consider how it prioritized "user
engagement" -- a metric involving time spent, likes, shares and
comments that for years had been the lodestar of its system.
Championed by Chris Cox, Facebook's chief product officer at the
time and a top deputy to Mr. Zuckerberg, the work was carried out
over much of 2017 and 2018 by engineers and researchers assigned to
a cross-jurisdictional task force dubbed "Common Ground" and
employees in newly created "Integrity Teams" embedded around the
company.
Even before the teams' 2017 creation, Facebook researchers had
found signs of trouble. A 2016 presentation that names as author a
Facebook researcher and sociologist, Monica Lee, found extremist
content thriving in more than one-third of large German political
groups on the platform. Swamped with racist, conspiracy-minded and
pro-Russian content, the groups were disproportionately influenced
by a subset of hyperactive users, the presentation notes. Most of
them were private or secret.
The high number of extremist groups was concerning, the
presentation says. Worse was Facebook's realization that its
algorithms were responsible for their growth. The 2016 presentation
states that "64% of all extremist group joins are due to our
recommendation tools" and that most of the activity came from the
platform's "Groups You Should Join" and "Discover" algorithms: "Our
recommendation systems grow the problem."
Ms. Lee, who remains at Facebook, didn't respond to inquiries.
Facebook declined to respond to questions about how it addressed
the problem in the presentation, which other employees said weren't
unique to Germany or the Groups product. In a presentation at an
international security conference in February, Mr. Zuckerberg said
the company tries not to recommend groups that break its rules or
are polarizing.
"We've learned a lot since 2016 and are not the same company
today," a Facebook spokeswoman said. "We've built a robust
integrity team, strengthened our policies and practices to limit
harmful content, and used research to understand our platform's
impact on society so we continue to improve."
The Common Ground team sought to tackle the polarization problem
directly, said people familiar with the team. Data scientists
involved with the effort found some interest groups -- often
hobby-based groups with no explicit ideological alignment --
brought people from different backgrounds together constructively.
Other groups appeared to incubate impulses to fight, spread
falsehoods or demonize a population of outsiders.
In keeping with Facebook's commitment to neutrality, the teams
decided Facebook shouldn't police people's opinions, stop conflict
on the platform, or prevent people from forming communities. The
vilification of one's opponents was the problem, according to one
internal document from the team.
"We're explicitly not going to build products that attempt to
change people's beliefs," one 2018 document states. "We're focused
on products that increase empathy, understanding, and humanization
of the 'other side.' "
Hot-button issues
One proposal sought to salvage conversations in groups derailed
by hot-button issues, according to the people familiar with the
team and internal documents. If two members of a Facebook group
devoted to parenting fought about vaccinations, the moderators
could establish a temporary subgroup to host the argument or limit
the frequency of posting on the topic to avoid a public flame
war.
Another idea, documents show, was to tweak recommendation
algorithms to suggest a wider range of Facebook groups than people
would ordinarily encounter.
Building these features and combating polarization might come at
a cost of lower engagement, the Common Ground team warned in a
mid-2018 document, describing some of its own proposals as
"antigrowth" and requiring Facebook to "take a moral stance."
Taking action would require Facebook to form partnerships with
academics and nonprofits to give credibility to changes affecting
public conversation, the document says. This was becoming difficult
as the company slogged through controversies after the 2016
presidential election.
"People don't trust us," said a presentation created in the
summer of 2018.
The engineers and data scientists on Facebook's Integrity Teams
-- chief among them, scientists who worked on newsfeed, the stream
of posts and photos that greet users when they visit Facebook --
arrived at the polarization problem indirectly, according to people
familiar with the teams. Asked to combat fake news, spam, clickbait
and inauthentic users, the employees looked for ways to diminish
the reach of such ills. One early discovery: Bad behavior came
disproportionately from a small pool of hyperpartisan users.
A second finding in the U.S. saw a larger infrastructure of
accounts and publishers on the far right than on the far left.
Outside observers were documenting the same phenomenon. The gap
meant even seemingly apolitical actions such as reducing the spread
of clickbait headlines -- along the lines of "You Won't Believe
What Happened Next" -- affected conservative speech more than
liberal content in aggregate.
That was a tough sell to Mr. Kaplan, said people who heard him
discuss Common Ground and Integrity proposals. A former deputy
chief of staff to George W. Bush, Mr. Kaplan became more involved
in content-ranking decisions after 2016 allegations Facebook had
suppressed trending news stories from conservative outlets. An
internal review didn't substantiate the claims of bias, Facebook's
then-general counsel Colin Stretch told Congress, but the damage to
Facebook's reputation among conservatives had been done.
Every significant new integrity-ranking initiative had to seek
the approval of not just engineering managers but also
representatives of the public policy, legal, marketing and
public-relations departments.
Lindsey Shepard, a former Facebook product-marketing director
who helped set up the Eat Your Veggies process, said it arose from
what she believed were reasonable concerns that overzealous
engineers might let their politics influence the platform.
"Engineers that were used to having autonomy maybe over-rotated
a bit" after the 2016 election to address Facebook's perceived
flaws, she said. The meetings helped keep that in check. "At the
end of the day, if we didn't reach consensus, we'd frame up the
different points of view, and then they'd be raised up to
Mark."
Scuttled projects
Disapproval from Mr. Kaplan's team or Facebook's communications
department could scuttle a project, said people familiar with the
effort. Negative policy-team reviews killed efforts to build a
classification system for hyperpolarized content. Likewise, the Eat
Your Veggies process shut down efforts to suppress clickbait about
politics more than on other topics.
Initiatives that survived were often weakened. Mr. Cox wooed
Carlos Gomez Uribe, former head of Netflix Inc.'s recommendation
system, to lead the newsfeed Integrity Team in January 2017. Within
a few months, Mr. Uribe began pushing to reduce the outsize impact
hyperactive users had.
Under Facebook's engagement-based metrics, a user who likes,
shares or comments on 1,500 pieces of content has more influence on
the platform and its algorithms than one who interacts with just 15
posts, allowing "super-sharers" to drown out less-active users.
Accounts with hyperactive engagement were far more partisan on
average than normal Facebook users, and they were more likely to
behave suspiciously, sometimes appearing on the platform as much as
20 hours a day and engaging in spam-like behavior. The behavior
suggested some were either people working in shifts or bots.
One proposal Mr. Uribe's team championed, called "Sparing
Sharing," would have reduced the spread of content
disproportionately favored by hyperactive users, according to
people familiar with it. Its effects would be heaviest on content
favored by users on the far right and left. Middle-of-the-road
users would gain influence.
Mr. Uribe called it "the happy face," said some of the people.
Facebook's data scientists believed it could bolster the platform's
defenses against spam and coordinated manipulation efforts of the
sort Russia undertook during the 2016 election.
Mr. Kaplan and other senior Facebook executives pushed back on
the grounds it might harm a hypothetical Girl Scout troop, said
people familiar with his comments. Suppose, Mr. Kaplan asked them,
that the girls became Facebook super-sharers to promote cookies?
Mitigating the reach of the platform's most dedicated users would
unfairly thwart them, he said.
Mr. Kaplan in the recent interview said he didn't remember
raising the Girl Scout example but was concerned about the effect
on publishers who happened to have enthusiastic followings.
The debate got kicked up to Mr. Zuckerberg, who heard out both
sides in a short meeting, said people briefed on it. His response:
Do it, but cut the weighting by 80%. Mr. Zuckerberg also signaled
he was losing interest in the effort to recalibrate the platform in
the name of social good, they said, asking that they not bring him
something like that again.
Mr. Uribe left Facebook and the tech industry within the year.
He declined to discuss his work at Facebook in detail but confirmed
his advocacy for the Sparing Sharing proposal. He said he left
Facebook because of his frustration with company executives and
their narrow focus on how integrity changes would affect American
politics. While proposals like his did disproportionately affect
conservatives in the U.S., he said, in other countries the opposite
was true.
Other projects met Sparing Sharing's fate: weakened, not killed.
Partial victories included efforts to promote news stories
garnering engagement from a broad user base, not just partisans,
and penalties for publishers that repeatedly shared false news or
directed users to ad-choked pages.
The tug of war was resolved in part by the growing furor over
the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In a September 2018 reorganization
of Facebook's newsfeed team, managers told employees the company's
priorities were shifting "away from societal good to individual
value," said people present for the discussion. If users wanted to
routinely view or post hostile content about groups they didn't
like, Facebook wouldn't suppress it if the content didn't
specifically violate the company's rules.
Mr. Cox left the company several months later after
disagreements regarding Facebook's pivot toward private encrypted
messaging. He hadn't won most fights he had engaged in on integrity
ranking and Common Ground product changes, people involved in the
effort said, and his departure left the remaining staffers working
on such projects without a high-level advocate.
The Common Ground team disbanded. The Integrity Teams still
exist, though many senior staffers left the company or headed to
Facebook's Instagram platform.
Mr. Zuckerberg announced in 2019 that Facebook would take down
content violating specific standards but where possible take a
hands-off approach to policing material not clearly violating its
standards.
"You can't impose tolerance top-down," he said in an October
speech at Georgetown University. "It has to come from people
opening up, sharing experiences, and developing a shared story for
society that we all feel we're a part of. That's how we make
progress together."
Write to Jeff Horwitz at Jeff.Horwitz@wsj.com and Deepa
Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 26, 2020 11:53 ET (15:53 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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