Facebook struggles to worm its way out of its polarization problem
Facebook has created a ”playbook” to help its employees rebut criticism that the company’s products fuel political polarization and social division.
The document, which cites a range of academic studies but does not include recent data from the company’s own research teams, was posted to Facebook’s internal Workplace discussion forum by Chief Product Officer Chris Cox and Pratiti Raychoudhury, vice president of research, earlier this week. During a Thursday webinar for employees, Cox said the document would “equip all of you to go home and have dinner” with friends and family and explain why public perceptions of Facebook are wrong.
In the paper, titled “What We Know About Polarization,” Cox and Raychodhury call polarization “an albatross public narrative for the company.”
“The implicit argument is that Facebook is contributing to a social problem of driving societies into contexts where they can’t trust each other, can’t share common ground, can’t have conversation about issues, and can’t share a common view on reality,” they write, adding that “the media narrative in this case is generally not supported by the research.”
While denying that Facebook meaningfully contributes to polarization during the webinar, Pablo Barberá, a research scientist at the company, also suggested political polarization could be a good thing during Thursday’s presentation.
“If we look back at history, a lot of the major social movements and major transformations, for example, the extension of civil rights or voting rights in this country have been the result of increasing polarization,” he told employees.
The paper and accompanying webinar are an indication of how Facebook will publicly address the perception that it is harmful to society, an issue that has become increasingly urgent in the aftermath of a divisive presidential election and attempted coup exacerbated by the misinformation and hate speech that had proliferated on the platform.
The presentation came more than two months after rioters — many of them stoked by misinformation on the social network about Joe Biden’s presidential win — stormed the US Capitol, and after various employees left Facebook in frustration, claiming it is not doing enough to address hate and extremism on its platform. Notably, the paper does not address internal data created or cited by departing employees that shows how divisive political content on the platform can radicalize people and degrade the overall Facebook user experience.
When shown the internal document by BuzzFeed News, one former Facebook employee who studied polarization at the company said, “This memo is corporate gaslighting disguised as a research brief.” They left the company last year and asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution.
“It suggests that because other factors have contributed to increased polarization, Facebook itself is somehow less likely to have contributed to the problem,” they said. “It also ignores a large body of reporting and research — including research conducted by internal Facebook teams — which demonstrates the polarizing effects of Facebook’s products, including (and perhaps especially) Facebook Groups.” [Continue reading…]