Containing Big Tech: How to Protect Our Civil Rights, Economy, and Democracy by Tom Kemp

Author:Tom Kemp [Kemp, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Public Policy, Science & Technology Policy, Social Science, Privacy & Surveillance, Computers, Internet, General
ISBN: 9781639080625
Google: 8Q7LEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B0CBQHSMC8
Barnesnoble: B0CBQHSMC8
Goodreads: 188371621
Publisher: Fast Company Press
Published: 2023-08-22T05:00:00+00:00

Algorithmic amplification of extremism and disinformation

As previously discussed, Big Tech firms like Meta and Google use AI to maximize user engagement on their social media platforms. So naturally, this facilitates the collection of more data and the serving of more ads. But in doing so, their services can promote content that favors controversy, disinformation, and extremism. The result is that hate speech and conspiracy theories can end up at the top of people’s news feeds on Facebook or are autoplayed as recommended videos on YouTube.

An example is an internal experiment performed by a Meta researcher in July 2019. The researcher created a Facebook account for an imaginary forty-one-year-old “conservative mother” from North Carolina named Carol Smith. After being set up to follow pages for Sinclair Broadcasting and Fox News, “Carol” was recommended to Facebook pages and groups associated with the militia group The Three Percenters and the QAnon conspiracy within a few weeks. Another internal Meta research report found that “64 percent of people who joined an extremist group on Facebook only did so because the company’s algorithm recommended it to them.”13

A tragic example involves the country of Myanmar. Hate speech and fake news about the Rohingya Muslim minority spread in 2016 and 2017 through social media sites like Meta’s Facebook. It eventually escalated into a full-blown genocide. Meta subsequently admitted that it had not done enough “to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence.”14

Another tragic example occurred in Ethiopia. In a $2 billion class-action lawsuit filed in December 2022, it was alleged that Meta monetized hate and violence in war-torn Ethiopia, leading to militants killing an Ethiopian professor. According to the son of the slain professor, Meta allowed “multiple posts with threats and misinformation about his father” to stay on the site and spread widely, even after being flagged for removal. Meta did not act on the posts until after the professor was killed.15

The problem of amplified disinformation and extremism on online platforms is more acute for non–English language content. For example, four years after the Myanmar genocide, the Facebook whistleblower testified in 2021 that 87 percent of Meta’s spending on taking down disinformation on the Facebook service was for English language content. Yet only 9 percent of Facebook users speak English. In addition, YouTube appears to also have a content moderation problem for non-English videos, as evidenced by the discovery in October 2022 of dozens of Spanish-language videos with over 1.6 million views promoting election fraud conspiracies.16

Given these and other examples, it is not surprising that an internal Meta report “found that the company was well aware that its product, specifically its recommendation engine, stoked divisiveness and polarization.” The report also noted that if left unchecked, the recommendation engine would continue to present “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.” Despite the report submitted to Meta executives detailing their system’s impact on society, Meta elected to ignore the report because it feared the changes would “disproportionately affect conservatives and might hurt engagement.

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