26 October 21
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Cutouts of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg outside the U.S. Capitol when he testified in front of Congress. (photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg News)
Facebook engineers gave extra value to emoji reactions, including ‘angry,’ pushing more emotional and provocative content into users’ news feeds
Behind the scenes, Facebook programmed the algorithm that decides what people see in their news feeds to use the reaction emoji as signals to push more emotional and provocative content — including content likely to make them angry. Starting in 2017, Facebook’s ranking algorithm treated emoji reactions as five times more valuable than “likes,” internal documents reveal. The theory was simple: Posts that prompted lots of reaction emoji tended to keep users more engaged, and keeping users engaged was the key to Facebook’s business.
Facebook’s own researchers were quick to suspect a critical flaw. Favoring “controversial” posts — including those that make users angry — could open “the door to more spam/abuse/clickbait inadvertently,” a staffer, whose name was redacted, wrote in one of the internal documents. A colleague responded, “It’s possible.”
The warning proved prescient. 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.
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. The power of the algorithmic promotion undermined the efforts of Facebook’s content moderators and integrity teams, who were fighting an uphill battle against toxic and harmful content.
The internal debate over the “angry” emoji and the findings about its effects shed light on the highly subjective human judgments that underlie Facebook’s news feed algorithm — the byzantine machine-learning software that decides for billions of people what kinds of posts they’ll see each time they open the app. The deliberations were revealed in disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by the legal counsel of whistleblower Frances Haugen. The redacted versions were reviewed by a consortium of news organizations, including The Washington Post.
“Anger and hate is the easiest way to grow on Facebook,” Haugen told the British Parliament on Monday.
In several cases, the documents show Facebook employees on its “integrity” teams raising flags about the human costs of specific elements of the ranking system — warnings that executives sometimes heeded and other times seemingly brushed aside. Employees evaluated and debated the importance of anger in society: Anger is a “core human emotion,” one staffer wrote, while another pointed out that anger-generating posts might be essential to protest movements against corrupt regimes.
An algorithm such as Facebook’s, which relies on sophisticated, opaque machine-learning techniques to generate its engagement predictions, “can sound mysterious and menacing,” said Noah Giansiracusa, a math professor at Bentley University in Massachusetts and author of the book “How Algorithms Create and Prevent Fake News.” “But at the end of the day, there’s one number that gets predicted — one output. And a human is deciding what that number is.”
Facebook spokesperson Dani Lever said: “We continue to work to understand what content creates negative experiences, so we can reduce its distribution. This includes content that has a disproportionate amount of angry reactions, for example.”
The weight of the angry reaction is just one of the many levers that Facebook engineers manipulate to shape the flow of information and conversation on the world’s largest social network — one that has been shown to influence everything from users’ emotions to political campaigns to atrocities.
Facebook takes into account numerous factors — some of which are weighted to count a lot, some of which count a little and some of which count as negative — that add up to a single score that the news feed algorithm generates for each post in each user’s feed, each time they refresh it. That score is in turn used to sort the posts, deciding which ones appear at the top and which appear so far down that you’ll probably never see them. That single all-encompassing scoring system is used to categorize and sort vast swaths of human interaction in nearly every country of the world and in more than 100 languages.
Facebook doesn’t publish the values its algorithm puts on different kinds of engagement, let alone the more than 10,000 “signals” that it has said its software can take into account in predicting each post’s likelihood of producing those forms of engagement. It often cites a fear of giving people with bad intentions a playbook to explain why it keeps the inner workings under wraps.
Facebook’s levers rely on signals most users wouldn’t notice, like how many long comments a post generates, or whether a video is live or recorded, or whether comments were made in plain text or with cartoon avatars, the documents show. It even accounts for the computing load that each post requires and the strength of the user’s Internet signal. Depending on the lever, the effects of even a tiny tweak can ripple across the network, shaping whether the news sources in your feed are reputable or sketchy, political or not, whether you saw more of your real friends or more posts from groups Facebook wanted you to join, or if what you saw would be likely to anger, bore or inspire you.
Beyond the debate over the angry emoji, the documents show Facebook employees wrestling with tough questions about the company’s values, performing cleverly constructed analyses. When they found that the algorithm was exacerbating harms, they advocated for tweaks they thought might help. But those proposals were sometimes overruled.
When boosts, like those for emoji, collided with “deboosts” or “demotions” meant to limit potentially harmful content, all that complicated math added up to a problem in protecting users. The average post got a score of a few hundred, according to the documents. But in 2019, a Facebook data scientist discovered there was no limit to how high the ranking scores could go.
If Facebook’s algorithms thought a post was bad, Facebook could cut its score in half, pushing most of instances of the post way down in users’ feeds. But a few posts could get scores as high as a billion, according to the documents. Cutting an astronomical score in half to “demote” it would still leave it with a score high enough to appear at the top of the user’s feed.
“Scary thought: civic demotions not working,” one Facebook employee noted.
The culture of experimentation ran deep at Facebook, as engineers pulled levers and measured the results. An experiment in 2012 that was published in 2014 sought to manipulate the emotional valence of posts shown in users’ feeds to be more positive or more negative, and then observed whether their own posts changed to match those moods, raising ethical concerns, The Post reported at the time. Another, reported by Haugen to Congress this month, involved turning off safety measures for a subset of users as a comparison to see if the measures worked at all.
A previously unreported set of experiments involved boosting some people more frequently into the feeds of some of their randomly chosen friends — and then, once the experiment ended, examining whether the pair of friends continued communication, according to the documents. A researcher hypothesized that, in other words, Facebook could cause relationships to become closer.
In 2017, Facebook was trying to reverse a worrying decline in how much people were posting and talking to each other on the site, and the emoji reactions gave it five new levers to pull. Each emotional reaction was worth five likes at the time. The logic was that a reaction emoji signaled the post had made a greater emotional impression than a like; reacting with an emoji took an extra step beyond the single click or tap of the like button. But Facebook was coy with the public as to the importance it was placing on these reactions: The company told Mashable in 2017 that it was weighting them just “a little more than likes.”
The move was consistent with a pattern, highlighted in the documents, in which Facebook set the weights very high on new features it was trying to encourage users to adopt. By training the algorithm to optimize for those features, Facebook’s engineers all but ensured they’d be widely used and seen. Not only that, but anyone posting on Facebook with the hope of reaching a wide audience — including publishers and political actors — would inevitably catch on that certain types of posts were working better than others.
At one point, CEO Mark Zuckerberg even encouraged users in a public reply to a user’s comment to use the angry reaction to signal they disliked something, although that would make Facebook show similar content more often.
Replies to a post, which signaled a larger effort than the tap of a reaction button, were weighted even higher, up to 30 times as much as a like. Facebook had found that interaction from a user’s friends on the site would create a sort of virtuous cycle that pushed users to post even more. The Wall Street Journal reported last month on how Facebook’s greater emphasis on comments, replies to comments and replies to re-shares — part of a metric it called “meaningful social interactions” — further incentivized divisive political posts. (That article also mentioned the early weight placed on the angry emoji, though not the subsequent debates over its impact.)
The goal of that metric is to “improve people’s experience by prioritizing posts that inspire interactions, particularly conversations, between family and friends,” Lever said.
The first downgrade to the angry emoji weighting came in 2018, when Facebook cut it to four times the value of a like, keeping the same weight for all of the emotions.
But it was apparent that not all emotional reactions were the same. Anger was the least used of the six emoji reactions, at 429 million clicks per week, compared with 63 billion likes and 11 billion “love” reactions, according to a 2020 document. Facebook’s data scientists found that angry reactions were “much more frequent” on problematic posts: “civic low quality news, civic misinfo, civic toxicity, health misinfo, and health antivax content,” according to a document from 2019. Its research that year showed the angry reaction was “being weaponized” by political figures.
In April 2019, Facebook put in place a mechanism to “demote” content that was receiving disproportionately angry reactions, although the documents don’t make clear how or where that was used, or what its effects were.
By July, a proposal began to circulate to cut the value of several emoji reactions down to that of a like, or even count them for nothing. The “angry” reaction, along with “wow” and “haha,” occurred more frequently on “toxic” content and misinformation. In another proposal, from late 2019, “love” and “sad” — apparently called “sorry” internally — would be worth four likes, because they were safer, according to the documents.
The proposal depended on Facebook higher-ups being “comfortable with the principle of different values for different reaction types,” the documents said. This would have been an easy fix, the Facebook employee said, with “fewer policy concerns” than a technically challenging attempt to identify toxic comments.
But at the last minute, the proposal to expand those measures worldwide was nixed.
“The voice of caution won out by not trying to distinguish different reaction types and hence different emotions,” a staffer later wrote.
Later that year, as part of a debate over how to adjust the algorithm to stop amplifying content that might subvert democratic norms, the proposal to value angry emoji reactions less was again floated. Another staffer proposed removing the button altogether. But again, the weightings remained in place.
Finally, last year, the flood of evidence broke through the dam. Additional research had found that users consistently didn’t like it when their posts received “angry” reactions, whether from friends or random people, according to the documents. Facebook cut the weight of all the reactions to one and a half times that of a like.
That September, Facebook finally stopped using the angry reaction as a signal of what its users wanted and cut its weight to zero, taking it out of the equation, the documents show. Its weight is still zero, Facebook’s Lever said. At the same time, it boosted “love” and “sad” to be worth two likes.
It was part of a broader fine-tuning of signals. For example, single-character comments would no longer count. Until that change was made, a comment just saying “yes” or “.” — tactics often used to game the system and appear higher in the news feed — had counted as 15 times the value of a like.
“Like any optimization, there’s going to be some ways that it gets exploited or taken advantage of,” Lars Backstrom, a vice president of engineering at Facebook, said in an emailed statement. “That’s why we have an integrity team that is trying to track those down and figure out how to mitigate them as efficiently as possible.”
But time and again, Facebook made adjustments to weightings after they had caused harm. Facebook wanted to encourage users to stream live video, which it favored over photo and text posts, so its weight could go as high as 600 times. That had helped cause “ultra-rapid virality for several low quality viral videos,” a document said. Live videos on Facebook played a big role in political events, including both the racial justice protests last year after the killing of George Floyd and the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
Immediately after the riot, Facebook frantically enacted its “Break the Glass” measures on safety efforts it had previously undone — including to cap the weight on live videos at only 60. Facebook didn’t respond to requests for comment about the weighting on live videos.
When Facebook finally set the weight on the angry reaction to zero, users began to get less misinformation, less “disturbing” content and less “graphic violence,” company data scientists found. As it turned out, after years of advocacy and pushback, there wasn’t a trade-off after all. According to one of the documents, users’ level of activity on Facebook was unaffected.
Dianna Brummel-Rathbun. (photo: Nicole Hester/Ann Arbor News/AP)
One anti-masker is dead of COVID, and another is threatening to call the militia into schools.
“My hubby said many people stood up and applauded after I was done!” Brummel-Rathbun wrote in a Facebook post with video the day after her speech at the Aug. 9 meeting. the next day.
Among those who watched the five-minute clip was her cousin Jackie Verhage Tellier, who joins every respectable medical and scientific authority in believing that masks, as well as vaccines, save lives.
Tellier loved Brummel-Rathbun no less for the political divide between them. “But, Diana was always stubborn and always did things her own way,” Tellier told The Daily Beast.
Tellier figured that in posting the video, Brummel-Rathbun hoped it would receive similar approval from a virtual audience of like-minded people.
“I have been an RN for over 35 years, working steadily through all this time,” she said on the video. “My child will not wear one on a bus, not in a car, not in a class, not in a hall, not for sports... Just because my child will not wear a mask at all. We will not wear them here nor there. We will not wear them anywhere.”
Then, in September, Tellier learned that scientific truth had hit Brummel-Rathbun in the form of a positive test for COVID-19. Tellier messaged her upon learning she was seriously ill.
“I said, ‘I just found out you’re in the hospital with COVID. I hope you’re doing okay,’” Tellier recalled. “I said, ‘I know we’ve had our differences, but you know I love you.’ She wrote back and said, ‘Thanks, hon.’”
Tellier was in a family e-mail chain that provided daily updates about Brumel-Rathbun’s condition.
“She was supposedly getting better,” Tellier recalled. “Her oxygen levels were going up.”
Brummel-Rathbun then took a turn for the worse. She died on Sept. 27. She was 57.
Tellier and her husband have medical conditions that make COVID a particular worry and they decided to attend the funeral virtually.
“We thought the risk was too much,” Tellier said. “We thought all the people going there were not going to be wearing a mask. And I was right.”
As word subsequently spread via posts and tweets that another anti-masker had been felled by the virus, the video that Brummel-Rathbun had posted began teaching the opposite lesson that she had intended due to the stark fact of her death.
Anybody who checked out her Facebook page saw that she was also opposed to vaccine mandates, having posted a guide to securing religious exemptions. Her profile pic remained a ‘no mask’ emblem with the words “Just Say No” and “Student Lives Matter.” An April 13 photo showed Brummel-Rathbun and her husband and 13-year-old son smiling as they stood in helmets and lifejackets, sensible precautions as they prepared to paddle on a body of water behind them.
“Let the adventure begin!” Brummel-Rathbun wrote.
For want of what were only sensible precautions while navigating a pandemic, the happy photo from six months ago is now heart wrenching to Tellier and all who loved Brummel-Rathbun.
“Her husband and son are alone,” Tellier said.
And that made it all the more disturbing when Tellier saw a video of another anti-masker addressing a Michigan school board. This one was of Marlena Pavlos-Hackney from Tellier’s hometown of Holland on Oct. 18.
“I recognize you, right?” a member of the Zeeland School District Board said when Pavlos-Hackney stepped up to speak.
“Maybe you do, maybe you don’t,” she replied. “I’m here to defend all the students.”
Pavlos-Hackney had received considerable media attention in March of last year, when she became the first Michigan restaurant owner to be jailed for failing to obey COVID restrictions. She served five days in the Ingham County jail and her eatery was ordered closed.
She had a completely fabricated warning posted in the window of Marlena’s Pizzeria and Bistro:
“Notice to all government officials. You are in violation of your oath of office by trespassing unlawfully on the property of this business establishment and committing an act of domestic terrorism under Section 802 of the Patriot Act [...] You are no longer protected under judicial immunity and are now subject to being arrested and also sued in your private capacity.”
On Sept. 2, the court gave her permission to reopen. She actually did so on Sept. 12.
“We fight for freedom!” she exclaimed to the press.
She does not have a child in the Zeeland School District and when she appeared before board five weeks later, it was not as a parent, but as a kind of self-appointed advocate. She informed the board that she had sought to have the sheriff’s office intervene to prevent any child from being required to wear a mask.
“They tell me they are not willing to get involved in all this bizarre nonsense,” she said. “They tell me that I have to call an attorney, which I am willing to do... And I will file a lawsuit against every one of you. So please respect all the children’s rights.”
She then suggested she might enlist help from a body that rings an alarm bell in that state.
“Michigan militia,” she said. “They will be in school to make sure constitutional protected rights will be defended.”
As reported by The Daily Beast, when she was jail in 2021, she was initially represented in court by a self-described “constitutional lawyer” with militia connections named Rick Martin, who was held in contempt when it turned out he was not actually an attorney. Fourteen Michigan militia members were arrested last year for allegedly conspiring to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
When contacted by The Daily Beast on Saturday, Pavlos-Hackney denied that she had said she might enlist the militia to address the mask issue in the schools.
“That’s false information,” she insisted.
She then modified her denial, saying she was not calling for armed militia members to intervene.
“I know they can’t come with guns into school and church,” she said.
On seeing Marlena Pavlos-Hackney’s school board video, Tellier was prompted to message her what she later described as “a warning.”
“Marlena, my cousin’s speech to the Lowell school board was anti mask and anti vaccine. She ended up in the ICU with COVID and died in October,” she wrote. “Please talk to your doctor about getting a vaccine and ask them about masking. You don’t want to become another statistic in this Republican death cult.”
Tellier was asked what she thinks is driving such unreasoning opposition to masks even as COVID has killed more than 23,000 in Michigan, more than 735,000 nationwide. She replied as someone who loves her cousin no less and still grieves her loss.
“It’s a twisted, destroyed view of liberty, that’s what it is,” she said. “It’s like the dumbing down of America.”
Plumes of greenhouse gas emissions. (photo: catazul/Pixabay/Mongabay)
Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics and a former regional administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), says the report was intentionally released in the lead-up to the COP26 summit in Glasgow, Scotland, when world leaders will gather to discuss strategies for tackling climate change. “There’s a little discussion on waste, but not much,” Enck told Mongabay in a video interview. “But plastics’ contribution to climate change is not on the agenda.”
The report, “New Coal: Plastics and Climate Change,” draws on public and private data sources to analyze 10 stages of plastic production in the U.S., including gas acquisition, transportation, manufacturing and disposal. It found that the U.S. plastics industry alone is presently responsible for at least 232 million metric tons of greenhouse gases every year, the equivalent of about 116.5 gigawatts in coal plants. But this number is expected to rise as dozens of plastics facilities are currently under construction across the country, mainly in Texas and Louisiana, according to the report.
“What’s quietly been happening under the radar is the petrochemical industry — the fossil fuel industry — has been ramping up investment in the production of plastics,” Enck said. “Unless you live in the communities where this is taking place, people just don’t know this.”
While there has been widespread media coverage on plastic waste and microplastics, less attention has been paid to the environmental impacts of plastic production. To create plastic food packaging and drink bottles that have become ubiquitous with daily life, gases need to be fracked from the ground, transported, and processed industrially. Each step contributes millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions, particularly methane, which is considered to be 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.
Shale fracking has been the method of choice for acquiring gases such as ethane and methane required for plastic production. But fracking can release harmful amounts of methane into the atmosphere, as well as contaminate the surface and groundwater and even trigger earthquakes, the report suggests. It’s estimated that fracking in the U.S. releases about 36 million tons of (CO2e) per year, or the same volume as 18 average-sized (500-megawatt) coal-fired power plants in 2020, according to the report. These numbers are expected to rise as the demand for plastic grows and fracking operations expand.
One of the most polluting stages of plastic production is the process of “cracking” ethane. At large industrial complexes called “cracker plants,” fracked gases are superheated until the molecules “crack” into new compounds such as ethylene, which is the foundation for polyethylene, one of the most common plastics in the world. Polyethylene is used to make anything from single-use food packaging to grocery bags to children’s toys. According to the report, facilities with ethane cracker plants released 70 million tons of CO2e in 2020, which is roughly what 35 average-sized coal-fired power plants released. Expansion of this sector is anticipated to add another 42 million tons of greenhouse gases per year by 2025.
The report also highlights the process of “chemical recycling,” which would turn plastics into fuel but leave a heavy carbon footprint. While very little chemical recycling currently takes place, the expansion of the industry could add up to 18 million tons of greenhouse gases each year, according to the report.
Enck says the numbers presented in the report are actually “very conservative,” so the amount of greenhouse gas emissions is likely to be an underestimate.
“There’s also a lot of emissions that are not tracked,” she said. “For instance, there’s lots of burning that happens at cement kilns. The U.S. EPA has no idea what the emissions from [those are].”
Another key finding is that the plastics industry releases about 90% of its reported climate pollution from plants situated near low-income communities mostly inhabited by people of color in states like Texas and Louisiana.
“This very much makes plastic production and disposal an environmental justice or an equity issue,” Enck said.
In 2019, the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) released a similar report, “Plastic and Climate Change: The Hidden Costs of a Plastic Planet,” on the plastics industry’s carbon footprint, although it took an international perspective on the issue. Using conservative calculations, it found that by 2050, greenhouse gas emissions from plastics could exceed 56 gigatons, which would be 10-13% of the entire remaining carbon budget.
Steven Feit, a senior attorney at CIEL and co-author of “Plastics and Climate Change,” said the new report from Beyond Plastics provides a “near-comprehensive profile” of current greenhouse gas emissions from plastics and the expected rise in emissions from planned expansions of facilities in the U.S. over the next several years. He added the report highlights parts of the plastics industry that the CIEL report did not, including the carbon footprint of insulating foams, additives, feedstock manufacturing and chemical recycling.
“This timely report is an important contribution that further articulates the profound climate impacts of the plastics industry,” Feit told Mongabay in an email. “By identifying ten distinct but interconnected sources of greenhouse gas emissions from the plastic lifecycle, The New Coal demonstrates the inextricable link between plastic and the climate crisis and demonstrates why proposed solutions that only address one piece of the plastics puzzle are insufficient.”
Climate change is considered to be one of nine planetary boundaries that helps sustain life on Earth. Its boundary is set at 350 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, although this was already surpassed in 1988, pushing the Earth into a new state typified by higher global temperatures and extreme weather events. If greenhouse gas emissions are not curbed, global temperatures could increase by 3° Celsius (5.4° Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels in as early as 43 years, according to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) sixth assessment report.
Bloomberg Philanthropies and Beyond Coal report that more than 65% of U.S. coal plants were retired by 2020. While this is a remarkable feat, Enck says the work being done to shut down these plants could be cancelled out by the emissions from plastics — unless plastics are curtailed.
“Plastic is the new coal,” Enck said. “We’ve got to reduce the use of plastic if we have any chance of hitting climate change goals.”
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
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