<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>New Delhi: </strong>Facebook’s troubles do not seem to end as "</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Facebook Papers"</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> are under scrutiny. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">The documents submitted by the former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen to the </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Securities and Exchange Commission reveal that “anger and hate is the easiest way to grow on Facebook.” </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Washington Post report reveals that Facebook’s experiment with the reaction emojis which were added with the iconic “like” button resulted in more traction for negative or anger invoking posts.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In 2017, Facebook added five reactions for the posts to their iconic “like” thumbs-up button that were “love,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad” and “angry.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Initially, these directions were given different values to these reactions; "angry" emoji having five times more value than that of a "like". It essentially means any content which is being reacted to with angry emoji will have more traction.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Dani Lever, Facebook’s spokesperson said the idea behind the experiment was to “improve people’s experience by prioritizing posts that inspire interactions”.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“That means Facebook for three years systematically amped up some of the worst of its platform, making it more prominent in users’ feeds and spreading it to a much wider audience,” concluded The Washington Post.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Facebook’s researchers had raised the concern that the practice could open “the door to more spam/abuse/clickbait inadvertently,” said a staffer according to the Washington Post’s report.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">However the “The voice of caution won out by not trying to distinguish different reaction types and hence different emotions,” stated another staffer in </span><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Facebook Papers</span></em><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p> <p><strong>Corrective Measures</strong></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">According to The Washington Post, the company’s data scientists confirmed in 2019 that posts that sparked angry reaction emoji were disproportionately likely to include misinformation, toxicity, and low-quality news. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This resulted in the reduction of the value of angry emoji to zero by 2020 with a value of two likes given to “love” and “sad” emoji which still continues.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“Like any optimization, there’s going to be some ways that it gets exploited or taken advantage of,” said Lars Backstrom, a vice president of engineering at Facebook defending the social networking giant.</span></p>
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