It’s All about the Algorithm 0
El Reg reports on Facebook’s promise to clean up its bots. It reports in passing on an earlier case of fakery and what it tells us about Facebook and “social” media.
It’s five years since the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones set up a fake business on Facebook and gained thousands of “likes” and clicks, many of which were, er, from fake accounts too. Facebook didn’t seem to care. It was all “engagement”, which justified its advertising model.
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Also recall that when Facebook introduced its controversial “Trending Topics” in 2014, it used teams of lowly paid human “curators”. Last spring it fired almost all of them, choosing to rely instead on algorithms. That decision, allied to Facebook’s incentives which rewarded clicks, meant that Trending Topics became a cesspool of spurious material.