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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.
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