This is correct, it's monetisation, not commissioning.

Facebook isn't paying to produce. It's paying for driving views and clicks on ads, regardless of how.

It's like if I hire a taxi driver to come to my house and drive me to the airport, and the taxi driver happens to run over a person in the process. It would be ridiculous to write 'he hired a driver to run over a person with a car'.

However, this also doesn't fully capture the reality of what is happening.

Let's say I routinely get a taxi, and taxi drivers routinely hit people because I happen to have a policy where I only pay them a large sum if they get to the airport impossibly fast, and the fastest way is to drive dangerously. Suppose I notice that every time I get a taxi, someone is run over because of my payment incentives. Suppose I then write a statement that says I will not pay the taxi if they hit a person. Suppose it keeps happening anyway, and I keep paying anyway. And suppose I benefit directly from this financially, because getting to the airport faster saves me money in missed flights.

Suppose I then do this on a worldwide scale involving many millions of people and create a market around this of tens of billions of dollars, suppose it's having a significant effect on public health and safety worldwide?

I think it's fair to then use more explicit language to hold me to account. I am financing death and destruction after all, even if technically I'm 'just getting a cab'.

> appear to be profiting from is "an invitation-only programme that lets you earn money from the performance of your eligible public reels, photos, stories and text posts."

The difference between “We ask white nationalists to join our invite only pay-for-views program” and “we commission white nationalists to make content” kinda seems like splitting hairs.

“Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”

Hope that we get to a point as a society that we acknowledge that companies can and should be held liable for inevitable second-order effects of the decisions they make and strategies they adopt.

It certainly applies to personal liability, e.g. manslaughter.

They are creating an environment where they incentivize it and profit from it. Whether or not that’s meaningfully different from directly commissioning it themselves seems like a minor quibble to me. It’s no different than a mob boss suggesting a rival should take a long walk off a short pier.

They wrote that title specifically to mislead people.

Yes, it says in the article that they are being paid through Meta’s content monetization program. The title is a bit of bait but it’s simply true that rage sells eyeballs so Meta does create an incentive for people to create awful content of many different types.

Twitter/X has actually paying some of those creators. They're changing that program in September.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2023/07/13/twi...

Yes. This article is just rage bait designed to rile up the type of people that want the government to restrict freedom of speech on social media.

No, Meta intentionally set up the incentive structure to reward rage bait content. You should expect they knew what they were going to get from doing that.

You don't get to be Meta's size and have Meta's experience with systems engineering and research on their own platform's incentives and outcomes, and not know exactly how this will go.

I think it depends on whether what Meta states about the "Content Monetization" program being invite only is true? If it is, that's effectively commissioning, if it's not, well Meta is lying and then the question is why lie?

First, pay people for the "engagement" their content generates, then aggressively promote the most "engaging" content. At the same time, such content is known to have certain characteristics. This is the Facebook (et al.) commissioning model.

If I may offer: Because they have become fiendishly adept at exploiting an addictive behaviour/weakness in our brains WHILE masquerading as some sort of social utility (AND perhaps vestigially retaining some semblance of that) - which, incidentally, is what (some) originally might have been, before encrappification.-

i recently downloaded it again after nearly a decade to use marketplace to buy a bike for my wife. Got the bike and deleted the app. but my god opening it up was hell. the interface on mobile is just....stressful. super cluttered, shit all over the place with notifications and things to see. first post i saw on there was someone i used to be friends with but havent thought about in years just blatently reposting ACTUAL racist shit... bought a bike in one day and deleted the app once again. horrible experience aside from the nice old dude who sold me the bike lol

It's an addiction. These platforms have been engineers to be addictive, and now people are hooked.

It's not like traditional media is any better. At least with social media platforms the means of producing media and building a following has been democratized.

Everyone needs their daily dose of outrage. Tell me – why are you here on HN interacting with this very post?

I'll help you understand: Important information is many times only found on these platforms. Many local businesses and events only have their info on Facebook or Instagram. Many local community groups are only on Facebook, and you'll find information there that has a real impact on your life (like bus broke down).

The other part is messaging. In parts of Europe nobody uses WhatsApp or SMS to communicate, everybody is on Facebook messenger.

And there's still the old school social media posts: cousin had a baby, friend got married. And also content made for the general public which is not malicious.

Hard agree, I keep hoping for the day society awakens as a whole to realize what they're doing to us.

I don't use FB or insta , but here are some reasons why people use it:

- Keep in touch with family

- Comfort from having their ideas reinforced

- Organize small events

- Share pictures easily

- not feel lonely

- stay current on world events

All of those have other routes to accomplish the same thing, but I guess they have the "Dropbox effect" of simplifying it so even techno challenged can use it.

Once I overcame the addiction tech, engineered over billions of brilliant-person-hours, atop research into human behavioural prediction and conditioning that’d make the KGB blush?

It’s the hundreds of people on my Facey that I have no other way to contact, and whom I can’t convince to move to e.g. Mastodon, even by offering to do or automate it for them. I suppose I could get an agent to run through the list with a script that gives my phone number to anyone who expresses a wish to remain in touch.

Quora has become a scam and CP-ridden cesspit but there are still some old-timers who can really write, and whom I’ve become somewhat emotionally invested in. And a habit of 13 years is hard to break.

If you want to "make it" as an artist / restaurateur / musician / million other things you kind of have to.

Hell, the most reliable communication channel for getting information from my kid's school is Instagram.

I'm not sure if you're talking about Meta platforms or social media in general. It's been years since I've used any Meta platform but I'm a daily user of Tiktok.

On Tiktok I don't think the platform is paying people to rage bait, at least not directly. But wannabe influencers will still try and rage bait their way into a viral video and hopefully a following. To me it's entirely transparent and I just move on but people fall for it. Lots of people. Gender wars is easy pickings. A good example was the $3 cheese surcharge on a burger. I knew immediately that was fake and it was later confirmed [1].

But why am I on Tiktok? Because there's actually some good stuff on there and just some plain entertaining stuff. But what really seals it is the comments. Therea re a ton of videos where the comments are the best part. There are some funny people out there. And Tiktok more than any other platform I've experienced seems to surface such comments.

But I could best describe Facebook as your racist uncle posting conspiracy theories and that's pretty much it.

[1]: https://www.bonappetit.com/story/tiktok-3-dollar-burger-chee...

> Why anyone still engages with these platforms is totally beyond me.

Because it provides a form entertainment, low hanging entertainment. All designed to grip you in your weakest fronts.

Map out what triggers a person visually. Feed it in to a LLM model and on the evil scale, you can start exploiting those who get angry based on whatever content.

Anger is one of the easiest trigger points in form of media. Broadcast a opposite view of an individual or a group. Downvotes and Upvotes are the primitive form of this and if you lack the emotional intelligence (thick skin) to handle the flack, you end up turning on emotions.

   Tabs are superior to spaces and Python is basically JavaScript with indentation.

Because they influence a lot of opinions which influences decisions which ends up influencing all our lives. Back around 2016 bots were loose on ut internet, with everyone freely gobbling up misinformation. Now there is an unofficial army of people determined to keep facts up at the forefront as well as other malicious social media negative trends at bay.

So is meth, but it’s as popular as ever.

Well, they claim they've done their own independent investigations, maybe started because of that bloggers/vloggers work, but still could be independent. What exactly is pointing towards it not being independent? It seems to be a detailed enough account of why the people break Facebook's own guidelines, yet receive money from Facebook.

Last Week Tonight has also done multiple bits on this topic over the years, with one during the current season with list of prior offenses.

And is Lithuania doing anything about it? In Romania Facebook and TikTok do whatever they please, and whatever they are paid to do, with complete impunity as the authorities actively do nothing at all.

And of course publish it.

Logically we might expect Meta to get into selling narcotics next.

"It is not Meta's role to police drug use"

The egregious part is the amplification part. Profit derives from that. Transmission and protection are neutral and they are necessary for all information especially if there is a history of freedom of expression; though of course some governments and others like regulating permissible expression.

Zuck was gagging for the Trump 2nd term so he could go all in on this shit. Slow clap for the Meta employees that enable it.

How do you feel about bookstores stocking titles like "Steal This Book"? What about libraries?

COVID-era “fact checking” went way beyond its remit and started to become a political tool. This had negative consequences for the average person’s trust in institutions of all kinds, because people really don’t like it when you attempt to police their individual political speech, even if it’s clearly inaccurate (as it so often is). It’s a good thing that it was removed.

The problem with Meta is the monetization and engagement model, not the lack of fact checking.

I just want to add, that they (FB and other big social media) probably understood what propaganda power they wield after 2016 facebook and cambridge analytica scandal.

Personally - I think that this was the moment when silicon valley billionaires without shadow of a doubt understood that they have power what used to be reserved only for state actors. Bonus - for using that power they get fined penny on the dollar at most or just slap on the wrist.

Update: now situation is even worse - states actively buy propaganda with social media companies, making those companies even more rich and influential.

I've noticed that when my partner and I look at the same Instagram post (within a few minutes of each other), we get completely different "top" comments. I suspect Instagram is ordering the comments individually for each user to maximize engagement.

All social media is drifting towards being a mirror that reflects your worst tendencies back at you. No content restrictions will fix this - the whole personalized approach to media is fundamentally rotten.

Horrible sympathy and religion bait like "I bet nobody will upvote this poor sick child with one leg, won't you? 1 amen = 1 prayer!"

Unfortunately things like craigslist died off and moved to Facebook marketplace somehow. I have to ask my wife to post things for me.

Marketplace. It’s pretty good that’s my main usage of Facebook nowadays

If you use the friends or "all" feeds, you just get stuff about what your friends are up to and things from pages you've subscribed to. Or I do anyway. Also good for discovering events locally.

Even the main feed isn't that bad for me. I guess it depends who your friends are and what you click on.

Connecting with your friends and family. Unfortunately they abandoned this long ago because they weren't satisfied with making a mountain of money.

I use FB for genealogy, because there are a lot of local groups where people post historical pictures, and older people in general are more active on Facebook.

I've seen some local groups taken over by ragebait slop, though. Ironically, not even right wing rage bait slop. As far as I can tell, it finally boiled over for the admin of the page, who was a fairly liberal guy in an extremely rural place, when a local museum found out he was anti-Trump and stopped collaborating with him on local history (maybe for fear of other's reactions). Since then he's strictly reposted rage material from other places/people on Facebook, much of it clearly low effort/AI generated.

I can't judge him, he lives there after all, and from this side of the ocean my political sympathies are definitively closer to him than to his enemies. Still :/

That used to be called "yellow journalism" in America (and "tabloid journalism" in the UK) which led to the Spanish American war in 1898.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish%E2%80%93American_War

My country has had totally unregulated media for 250 years. I'm not sure what other historical examples you have to justify your moral panic, and I understand that more authoritarian societies will struggle with such an approach but I assure you that we have been doing just fine in spite of the occasional chaos.

“Unregulated media.” LOL.

But regulated media is also a shit show!

To some degree I think social media algorithms already altered our behavior enough that extreme and controversial content generation would continue even if we disabled the algorithms. They've reinforced the memes enough now that they are self-sustaining.

"The Model" didn't decide anything. Facebook and these other attention economy companies have been A/B testing for two decades now, and there have been multiple "Metas" they have found. They have all converged eventually on ragebait being an extremely effective engagement driver.

They didn't just run a linear regression or whatever on some data and magically get the most rage inducing system. They made conscious decisions at nearly every step to make changes to optimize for "Engagement", which at this point is a code word that means "Controversial" the same way that a video of someone eating a toddler would be "Controversial"

It's digital crack pointed at a subsection of our brain that evolved to do group signalling.

For some reason I always get insane deals locally on Marketplace. Bought a brand new 3DS with 4 games this weekend 5 kms away from me for ~50€. People would sell this for 200€ on eBay.

I have a dedicated profile for marketplace. I managed to keep it separate from my real meta account for a long time but they eventually tricked me into linking it. We need a Wikipedia model online marketplace. Craigslist was close, but didn’t keep up.

FB and IG reels both. Twitter gets a lot of rightfully owed criticism about it's fair share but its always weird to me seeing people slam twitter then go right on to IG or some other meta owned app as if its significantly different.

Is it ethical wrong in this case, to wish those persons to get beaten up one day, by one of the people where they fueled their hate (who do take it out on other people for real)? So they reap what they sow?

You don't have to censor, but you don't have to pay either

It's not a release valve, it's a honeypot so the 99% keep blaming each other. Shut it down and something might actually happen in the real world.

Indeed. What I noticed is that the quality of the videos went down on youtube in the last 3 years. Now, the quality was never as great as it used to be anyway, but Google changed various things that made youtube worse. They are slowly killing off youtube without realising it.

CCP is keeping tight control over social media platforms first and foremost to prevent spreading information which could topple CCP.

"Last month 60 popular celebrity gossip sites were closed overnight for corrupting "core socialist values," and a new regulation released in May requires all online news portals to be managed by Communist Party-sanctioned editorial staff."

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-40896235

Rage-bait invented the "culture war" you're talking about.

Not Clickbait.

If you provide both:

a) a service to earn money from content

b) an algo promoting those videos

then yes, IMHO they pay them directly for the content produced.

So they do directly pay them?

You can't say that here.

This is how we also get stuff like Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_pet-eating_hoax

> You can only change your own habits

Rather like smoking, I can only change my own habits (have never smoked) but that won't prevent me from being harmed by other people's habits.

Even if I don't use Facebook, I can be harmed by Facebook voters.

Any solution that requires individuals to “just” do something that’s contrary to their nature is not a solution.

No society has ever solved a serious problem by “just” doing something on an individual scale en masse.

Think about what you’re suggesting. Individual action that acts like coordinated action. It’s impossible at scale. It’s a total contradiction.

(This is not even touching on the fact that the vast majority of oil use and pollution comes from military, energy, and industrial uses, not individual consumers.)

This does not imply that every problem can or even should be solved, but you’re not going to solve it this way.

Out of interest, would you have made this argument with respect to Big Tobacco back in the day? In my view surveillance-based behavioural recommendation engines belong very much in the same category.

Meta could help the situation, for instance by providing fact-checking tools and banning rage-bait creators.

Instead they have removed those tools and are paying these creators. So it's not just consumers to blame here.

I'm not holding my breath for masses to become informed, rational, responsible and balanced overall.

And why would the responsibility lie solely on consumers to act perfectly

Because, often, that's how they became the richest, most powerful humans. If your goal is to have money and power, and you have more today than yesterday, the world for you didn't get worse.

If we were normal society companies like Meta would be shut down before their CEO could commit crimes against humanities

What are you trying to say? That Facebook should be excused because others also behave badly?

Otherwise, we can dislike both things and it adds nothing to say "but why aren't your talking about the other thing instead". And for what it's worth, there is a pretty clear difference between the journalistic standards of FB bait and of the legacy media.

Social media has been protected by the Safe Harbour rules because they had millions of users creating content which was difficult to monitor and moderate.

If they start producing their own content they might get considered like a news organisation with a whole different set of rules being applied to them and Safe Harbour being inapplicable.

One big difference is regulation and algorithms. All viewers/readers see the same content in traditional media, and they’re all subject to scrutiny by government regulators (however effective or not they may be).

Social media networks display different things to different people so it’s borderline impossible to know exactly what they’re even showing. That makes regulation extremely difficult.

More broadly, this perspective depresses me. I’m old enough to remember the promise of the internet when we first all got it: that it would democratise information and we’d be able to break free of the issues with traditional media. Fast forward to today and we’re asking “why shouldn’t the tech giants monetise hate speech?”. How far we’ve fallen.

With social media you can spend small amounts of money , create media and target people half across the globe from you.

ruzzian troll farm employee cannot call into fox news and say “create 100 John Does impersonating MAGA texans (or whatever), present them as real and I will pay you 5$ for that”. Such troll can automate all this and present media somewhat realistically on FB.

> How is this any different than traditional media?

Scale, lower entry bar, lack of regulation.

Sure, and Ebola and influenza share traits too. I’m not sure that makes them interchangeable though.

>> How is this any different than traditional media?

Facebook is global. Traditional media is much more heavily regulated in some countries and while it may not be perfect, it's not comparable to the shit show that is social media.