Excerpts from one of the leaked documents. Disturbing.:
> Research conducted in the EU reveals that political parties "feel strongly that the change to the algorithm has forced them to skew negative in their communications on Facebook, with the downstream effect of leading them into more extreme policy positions." For example, in Poland, "one party’s social media management team estimates that they have shifted the proportion of their posts from 50/50 positive/negative to 80% negative and 20% positive, explicitly as a function of the change to the algorithm… Many parties, including those that have shifted strongly to the negative, worry about the long-term effects on democracy." We have heard similar feedback from parties in India and Taiwan.
> News publishers, too, are concerned about the incentives MSI created. We received direct feedback from BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti that his team feels "MSI ranking isn’t actually rewarding content that drives meaningful social interactions. They feel pressure to make bad content or underperform." Peretti related that "when we create meaningful content, it doesn’t get rewarded, "but more sensationalist and divisive content (such as "fad/junky science", "extremely disturbing news", "gross" images, and content exploiting racial divisions) is more successful.
> Research conducted in the EU reveals that political parties "feel strongly that the change to the algorithm has forced them to skew negative in their communications on Facebook, with the downstream effect of leading them into more extreme policy positions." For example, in Poland, "one party’s social media management team estimates that they have shifted the proportion of their posts from 50/50 positive/negative to 80% negative and 20% positive, explicitly as a function of the change to the algorithm… Many parties, including those that have shifted strongly to the negative, worry about the long-term effects on democracy." We have heard similar feedback from parties in India and Taiwan.
> News publishers, too, are concerned about the incentives MSI created. We received direct feedback from BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti that his team feels "MSI ranking isn’t actually rewarding content that drives meaningful social interactions. They feel pressure to make bad content or underperform." Peretti related that "when we create meaningful content, it doesn’t get rewarded, "but more sensationalist and divisive content (such as "fad/junky science", "extremely disturbing news", "gross" images, and content exploiting racial divisions) is more successful.