Valuations and Values
Welcome
Facebook whistle-blower Frances Haugen stirred up a lot of trouble for her former company with her recent appearance on Capital Hill. A vivid picture of Facebook's internal culture came to light in her recent testimony. One of the more disturbing revelations was that the angry emoji reportedly carried five times more weight in the Facebook algorithm than the like button.
Dear Reader,
Facebook whistle-blower Frances Haugen stirred up a lot of trouble for her former company with her recent appearance on Capital Hill. A vivid picture of Facebook's internal culture came to light in her recent testimony. One of the more disturbing revelations was that the angry emoji reportedly carried five times more weight in the Facebook algorithm than the like button [1]. Apparently, all the emojis had equal weight, but it was the angry face that tended to serve as a counterpoint to the Like button, which isn't technically an emoji. The result was that stuff that makes you angry was five times (later cut to four times) more likely to end up in your newsfeed than stuff you liked. Facebook was apparently aware of this but didn't take sufficient steps to fix it, which was an optical disaster. After years of saying their goal was to connect people, these revelations left the impression that their real goal was to maximize clicks, even if it led to division.
The situation was obviously really broken, but who or what was to blame? The problem with assigning a single culprit for such a fiasco is that you imply that the only issue is the implementation: If it weren't for a process snafu or a few bad actors, everything would have been fine. In fact, the system itself is the problem, and I'm not just talking about the kooky and often irrational Internet advertising economy (which certainly is a problem). The deeper problem is the business of business, or, more specifically, the business of how new companies get off the ground.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
TuxCare Announces Support for AlmaLinux 9.2
Thanks to TuxCare, AlmaLinux 9.2 (and soon version 9.6) now enjoys years of ongoing patching and compliance.
-
Go-Based Botnet Attacking IoT Devices
Using an SSH credential brute-force attack, the Go-based PumaBot is exploiting IoT devices everywhere.
-
Plasma 6.5 Promises Better Memory Optimization
With the stable Plasma 6.4 on the horizon, KDE has a few new tricks up its sleeve for Plasma 6.5.
-
KaOS 2025.05 Officially Qt5 Free
If you're a fan of independent Linux distributions, the team behind KaOS is proud to announce the latest iteration that includes kernel 6.14 and KDE's Plasma 6.3.5.
-
Linux Kernel 6.15 Now Available
The latest Linux kernel is now available with several new features/improvements and the usual bug fixes.
-
Microsoft Makes Surprising WSL Announcement
In a move that might surprise some users, Microsoft has made Windows Subsystem for Linux open source.
-
Red Hat Releases RHEL 10 Early
Red Hat quietly rolled out the official release of RHEL 10.0 a bit early.
-
openSUSE Joins End of 10
openSUSE has decided to not only join the End of 10 movement but it also will no longer support the Deepin Desktop Environment.
-
New Version of Flatpak Released
Flatpak 1.16.1 is now available as the latest, stable version with various improvements.
-
IBM Announces Powerhouse Linux Server
IBM has unleashed a seriously powerful Linux server with the LinuxONE Emperor 5.