John Goerzen: Facebook’s Blocking Decisions Are Deliberate – Including Their Censorship of Mastodon


In the aftermath of my report of Facebook censoring mentions of the open-source social network Mastodon, there was a lot of conversation about whether or not this was deliberate.
That conversation seemed to focus on whether a human speficially added joinmastodon.org to some sort of blacklist. But that?s not even relevant.
OF COURSE it was deliberate, because of how Facebook tunes its algorithm.
Facebook?s algorithm is tuned for Facebook?s profit. That means it?s tuned to maximize the time people spend on the site ? engagement. In other words, it is tuned to keep your attention on Facebook.
Why do you think there is so much junk on Facebook? So much anti-vax, anti-science, conspiracy nonsense from the likes of Breitbart? It?s not because their algorithm is incapable of surfacing the good content; we already know it can because they temporarily pivoted it shortly after the last US election. They intentionally undid its efforts to make high-quality news sources more prominent ? twice.
Facebook has said that certain anti-vax disinformation posts violate its policies. It has an extremely cumbersome way to report them, but it can be done and I have. These reports are met with either silence or a response claiming the content didn?t violate their guidelines.
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