Dear all, I'd add also that the article is labelled "The Facebook Papers", linking it somehow to the Haugen's leak. It would be great to know more - for curiosity's sake - what the authors mean with "drawing from Haugen’s documents". *The Atlantic* was part of the media consortium that worked on the leaked documents and it would be great if they shared them with scholars for such a research. Best, Il giorno ven 11 feb 2022 alle ore 00:18 Denby Weller <dweller@swin.edu.au> ha scritto:
I’m really interested to hear from anyone on Adam’s question too. Thanks for asking, Adam!
From: Air-L <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org> on behalf of Adam Burke < adamburkemail@gmail.com> Date: Friday, 11 February 2022 at 10:58 am To: Listserv AOIR <air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Subject: Re: [Air-L] Data analysis shows power of Facebook super-users to distort discourse
It's a good insight and this definitely seems consistent with dynamics on Facebook in general, or, indeed, with the sewer my Facebook feed quickly turns into if I don't ruthlessly focus it on personal friends and local community groups.
As a researcher outside this specific communications / platforms / hate speech area, I am curious about one methodological thing.
""" For more than a year, we’ve been analyzing a massive new data set that we designed to study public behavior on the 500 U.S. Facebook pages that get the most engagement from users. Our research, part of which will be submitted for peer review later this year, aims to better understand the people who spread hate and misinformation on Facebook. """
It seems an unusual choice to go to a big mainstream news publication as the first public outing of this analysis? I understand publication lead times can be long, but since a great deal of detailed work has clearly been done already, which the researchers have great confidence in, I'm surprised there isn't any pre-print or public report made available. A parallel release might also have made sense. There's lots of examples of this in other fields, but a recent one is the speed at which COVID research was able to proceed due to pre-print papers.
Lack of a public research artifact also seems to make their research too easy for Facebook to dismiss: """ Facebook declined to answer our questions for this article, and instead provided this statement: “While we’re not able to comment on research we haven’t seen, the small parts that have been shared with us are inaccurate and seem to fundamentally misunderstand how News Feed works. [...] " """
Since there are many experienced researchers on the list, it would be great if someone could take the time to explain.
Cheers Adam Burke
On Fri, 11 Feb 2022 at 09:34, Alexandre A. Gonzales < aarnsgonzales@gmail.com> wrote:
It is a very good article about Facebook (or Meta) indeed, and it reminded me of the initiative from the Center for Internet and Society of India, that submitted a policy consultation to the Facebook Oversight Board regarding their "X-Check" system, or whitelisted accounts on the platform. I do not know if the "superusers" analyzed in the The Atlantich article are in the X-Check system, but its findings may help better understand the function of the "X-Check" for the company
To whom it may interest, here's the link to the submission presented to the Oversight Board:
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/submission-to-the-facebook-ov... < https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/submission-to-the-facebook-ov...
Em qui., 10 de fev. de 2022 às 15:19, Sarah Ann Oates <soates@umd.edu> escreveu:
Wow, if you read or teach one article about FB, this should be it I think. Sarah Sarah Oates Pronoun: she/her
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On Thu, Feb 10, 2022 at 1:15 PM Colin Delany <cpd@epolitics.com>
wrote:
Makes perfect sense, based on what we know about the Fb algorithm.
The
researchers have studied the patterns/effects in detail, and you might be interested in both the findings and the methodology.
"And because Facebook’s algorithm rewards engagement, these superusers have enormous influence over which posts are seen first in other users’ feeds, and which are never seen at all. Even more shocking is just how nasty most of these hyper-influential users are. The most abusive people on Facebook, it turns out, are given the most power to shape what Facebook is."
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/02/facebook-hate-speech-... < https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/02/facebook-hate-speech-...
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