Whether a Mexican drug cartel is using Facebook to recruit contract killers, or whether organs or women are being sold as sex slaves or domestic servants on Instagram, the social media giant’s response to these facts is every time judged ” insufficient or even non-existent “. This clear observation emanates from within the global giant of social networks. And not from just anyone. Several of his “investigators” specializing in content deemed sensitive, exasperated, opened up to the question. Wall Street Journal, supporting documents. Super-moderators who had yet been recruited by the multinational to face the many criticisms of its laxity.
Thus, when a former policeman recruited by Facebook pointed out that the Jalisco Nueva Generacion cartel was organizing itself on the social network, recruiting, naming targets, launching punitive expeditions and posting videos of the executions there, only part of the pages ended up being deleted. When, for months, calls for the massacre of the Rohingya minority in Burma could be freely published there, Facebook contented itself with a statement of apologies.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s promises to recruit heavily to clean up have clearly not been kept. According to the daily, 87% of significant moderation is done by Americans, while the United States and Canada now only represent 10% of the content published on the group’s social networks. Thus, when employees alert armed groups in Ethiopia to use Facebook to call for ethnic cleansing on minorities, but they do not master the language, the hierarchy responds to them that it will train an artificial intelligence. to moderate. It took Apple threatening to remove Instagram from its licensed apps before pages selling servants or prostitutes began to moderate.
Anger, a very profitable emotion
Other documents also show that more than 5 million celebrities are not subject to the same rules of moderation as ordinary people. Instagram forbids nudity? Footballer Neymar was able to show his 10 million subscribers nude photos of a woman who accused him of rape. This impunity is allowed by XCheck, presented as a “quality control for VIP”, but described as follows in an internal memo: “We don’t actually do what we say we do publicly. “ The main influencers thus have privileges, because they generate an audience and allow publicity to flow.
This same logic prevails for content recommendations. When Mark Zuckerberg said in early 2018 that the goal of Facebook’s new algorithm was ” to strengthen links between users” and ” improve their well-being » , he knew it was wrong. Internal tests had shown that this new tool for promoting articles or publishing relatives “Made Facebook, and those who used it, more angry” . It is the most profitable emotion for the social network, the one that leads to the most comments and shares. “Our approach has had unhealthy side effects on large slices of public content, such as politics and news,” then alerted a team of data specialists in an internal memo. “Disinformation, toxicity and violent messages have spread excessively among the most shared content”, continue these Facebook employees, confessing their concern about the “Long-term negative effects for democracy”that they helped create.
If anger is dominant on Facebook, other emotions reign on Instagram, where 40% of users are under 22 years old. “Thirty-two percent of teenage girls said that when they felt bad about themselves, Instagram made them feel worse,” reveals another internal note dated March 2020, confirming a previous study from 2019 which concluded: “We make self-image and body image problems worse in one in three teenage girls. “ Several panels of young people from different countries were studied, all “Blame Instagram for increased rates of anxiety and depression” . 40% of social network users who feel“Unattractive”said that feeling started on the app. However, last March, Mark Zuckerberg declared:“Our research shows that using social apps can have positive effects on mental health. “But the CEO refused to provide the content of this research to the US Congress, which requested it.“Facebook seems to be inspired by Big Tobacco, targeting teenagers with potentially dangerous products while hiding the scientific results from the public”,accused Democrat Senator Richard Blumenthal.
In terms of advertising revenue, on the other hand, this strategy of capturing the attention of users, whatever the consequences, is working well: Facebook raised $ 86 billion in 2020, and this year promises to be even more profitable.
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