This week…
Facebook’s dead, long live Meta.
Here’s a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
Right-to-disconnect policies included in new labour legislation being introduced by Ontario government
CBC News:
The legislation would require employers with 25 or more employees to develop disconnecting-from-work policies, which could include expectations about response time for emails and encouraging employees to turn on out-of-office notifications when they are not working.
Monte McNaughton, the minister of Labour, Training and Skills Development, will introduce the Working for Workers Act, 2021.
The proposed legislation will also prohibit employers from using non-compete agreements.
Five points for anger, one for a ‘like’: How Facebook’s formula fostered rage and misinformation ($)
Jeremy B. Merrill and Will Oremus for WaPo:
Five years ago, Facebook gave its users five new ways to react to a post in their news feed beyond the iconic “like” thumbs-up: “love,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad” and “angry.”
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.”
More from Charles Arthur on this:
Not widely known: Facebook introduced the change because of users in Myanmar, who only had the option to “Like”, which they dutifully did (they thought it meant the same as “I’ve read this”) on everything – especially hate speech. (As I document in Social Warming.)
Facebook also couldn’t read what they were writing in posts because the Zawgyi font they used isn’t Unicode and doesn’t translate. So it needed icons – emoji – to see what they were saying. And then things got worse.
What I read, watch and listen to…
I’m reading Cinelle Barnes essay on Catapult, When do you stop writing? Hoping to find a sign…
I’m watching Ted Lasso. B-99 vibes, but with football.
Chart of the week
The disinformation economy looks like this—boring and unintelligible:
The advertising supply chain is the ATM of the disinformation economy, say Nandini Jammi and Claire Atkin, and they are ready to rip out its beating heart with the non-profit watchdog, Check My Ads Institute.