Facebook is becoming a ‘monster hard to control’

Last weekend, The Verge said, an error in the news ranking algorithm leading to views of misinformation, violence, and offensive content on the Internet. Facebook 30% increase over the course of six months. The incident made many people question the expertise of the technical team, who are the leading experts behind the system of the world’s largest social network.

According to Fortune, the report also leaves open a host of more important questions from users to Facebook: How many false posts have been improperly promoted, in fact? How many additional views do these posts get due to errors? What content is being circulated the most? It took 6 months to fix a bug, how cumbersome is Facebook?

Joe Osborne, a spokesman for Meta, said the bug “didn’t have much of a lasting impact on the content people watched”. However, he did not provide any data for his claims.

Experts say that Meta’s inability to release data reinforces some of the previous comments about Facebook: An uncontrollable monster.

“Facebook is still injecting all kinds of toxic content into countless brains every day,” Fortune comment. “Even with their best efforts, they still can’t figure out how to solve the problem through the things they’re doing like AI, manual content moderation, or algorithmically downgrading posts.”

Sahar Massachi, co-founder of the Integrity Institute and a former member of Facebook’s integrity team, thinks the latest Facebook incident is actually inevitable and understandable. “On social media today, users seem to be abandoned when safety protocols go bad. We need real transparency to build an accountable and sustainable system,” she said.

According to Business Insider, the problem of losing control of content has been with Facebook for a long time. With three billion users on the platform, the company cannot control hate speech and fake news, despite its strong moderation team and application of WHO and top algorithms.

Meanwhile, ProPublica said Facebook’s enforcement of its hate speech rules was “uneven”. The New York-based nonprofit said that the moderators of the world’s largest social network “often have different views on the same issue”, and do not adhere to complex guidelines. Facebook magazine.

The CEO himself Mark Zuckerberg Also big problem of Facebook. During his many years as a leader, although incidents of fake news and misinformation on the platform occur with increasing frequency, he has not come up with an effective policy to improve or fix, even let the problem be. repeat over and over again. With his authoritarian behavior, many times investors called on Zuckerberg to leave the executive position.

The head of Facebook is shifting focus to the virtual universe metaverse Although his real world is full of problems. “The direction is clear, but our path forward is not completely defined,” Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook late last year.

According to Guardian, the problem of fake news and misinformation on Facebook will become more and more out of control if Meta continues to apply the current policies and practices to its social network. Some other experts said that lawmakers need to require technology companies like Facebook to provide more documents, especially content moderation activities or internal research, to come up with solutions. master to control social networks. A more practical solution is to limit the power of large-scale platforms with antitrust penalties.

Bao Lam