Misinformation & polarizing Facebook feeds (Spam Mail #13)

Hi there,

This week I have a few links about how polarizing our social feeds are. It angers me how much evidence there is that maximizing engagement increases polarization, yet there is no regulation to hold companies accountable for the hatred and violence they fuel. The article this week on how Facebook got addicted to misinformation is a must read.

As always, a bunch of cool links, and the Future Today Institute’s latest tech trend report has me nerding out.

See you next time.

💩 Cool Shit

Split Screen - A tool to show you how different American’s Facebook feeds are.

Zoom escaper - A tool to self-sabotage your audio stream so you can get out of a work call (if you’re on a call with me and I’m having audio issues, it’s not because of this I swear).

Sounds of the Pub - Following the bar sounds from a few weeks ago, bring back the sounds of a local pub.

Mini Tokyo 3D - Realtime interactive map of Tokyo’s subway system.

Tracking clothes - Someone tracked everything they wore for 3 years to calculate the cost per wear.

The Preposterous Web Portal of Erik Bernacchi - A fun, whimsical portfolio site that simulates a computer OS, with a start-up screen to boot.

Fact Checking Journalist Toolbox - A great list of resources to verify information.

Emoji Party - Exactly what it says.

💎 Word gems

How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation (MIT Technology Review / Karen Hao)

If you’ve read anything about misinformation or polarization online, this article is a must. Hao outlines how aware Facebook is that ‘models that maximize engagement increase polarization’ and yet, their addiction to AI and growth means they have no incentive to fix these problems.

Everything the company does and chooses not to do flows from a single motivation: Zuckerberg’s relentless desire for growth. Quiñonero’s AI expertise supercharged that growth. His team got pigeonholed into targeting AI bias, as I learned in my reporting, because preventing such bias helps the company avoid proposed regulation that might, if passed, hamper that growth. Facebook leadership has also repeatedly weakened or halted many initiatives meant to clean up misinformation on the platform because doing so would undermine that growth.

In other words, the Responsible AI team’s work—whatever its merits on the specific problem of tackling AI bias—is essentially irrelevant to fixing the bigger problems of misinformation, extremism, and political polarization. And it’s all of us who pay the price.

And a follow-up, one of the editors of the article wrote a fantastic tweet thread on the PR strategy Facebook used to challenge the article, and why they refused to make edits to the original article:

The Data Visualizations Behind COVID-19 Skepticism (MIT Visualization Group)

This research used a community detection analysis to cluster users into anti-mask groups. They examine how these groups are skeptical of the data used to make visualizations in data-driven stories.

Most fundamentally, anti-mask groups mistrust the scientific establishment because they believe that science has been corrupted by profit motives and by progressive politics hellbent on increasing social control. Tobacco companies, they rightly argue, historically funded science that misled the public about whether or not smoking caused cancer. Pharmaceutical companies are therefore in a similar boat: companies like Moderna and Pfizer stand to profit billions from the vaccine, so it is in their interest to inflate the pandemic’s death toll as much as possible. Knowledge from the CDC, academia, or pharmaceutical companies therefore needs to be subject to more rigorous scrutiny and not accepted as consensus. Arguing that anti-maskers simply need more scientific literacy is to characterize their approach as inexplicably extreme, and these users interpret these calls as further evidence of the “Radical Left’s” impulse to condescend to citizens who actually espouse common sense.

Future Today Institute’s 2021 Tech Trends Report

FTI this week released the 2021 edition of one of my favorite trend reports and it’s a must read. I’m still working through the 500+ page report, here’s one great quote on Scoring + Recognition:

There’s an old Chinese adage that says, “People are doing things, and the sky is watching.” But it holds true for the West, too. Increasingly, everything we do is being watched and recorded. Algorithms assign us scores all the time, by governments in some countries and by the commercial sector in others.

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