Where does social media go from here? The leaked documents known as the Facebook Papers hammered home the fact—if there was any doubt remaining—that even the world’s most sophisticated content moderation systems can’t keep pace with human misbehavior on the billions-of-users scale, or the damage generated by algorithms designed to maximize engagement.
Jeff Allen spent four years working as a data scientist at Facebook, including two years on its integrity team, before leaving in late 2019. In October, along with former colleague Sahar Massachi, he launched the Integrity Institute, an organization devoted to bringing together current and former integrity researchers to develop ideas and best practices for an industry that sorely needs them. We spoke earlier this week about how companies like Facebook should rethink their approach to platform design—including taking a page from the media industry at the turn of the 20th century.
WIRED: We’ve all heard a lot about how Facebook optimizes for engagement. But you could argue that people just like to click on the scandalous, the naughty, the provocative, the whatever. Are we blaming algorithms for user behavior?
Jeff Allen: This is a really good question, and sort of a hot debate topic internally. To what extent are you just giving people what they want?
A historical anecdote I keep in my head is The New York Times in the 1890s. You had yellow journalism, you had young boys standing on street corners yelling out crazy things just to get attention so people would notice them as they walked by. If you have to say something that’ll get people to buy a newspaper in that moment, the headlines are going to be really sensational.
My understanding is that the new business model led by The New York Times was, “What if you made a brand that people trust and you yelled out, ‘Hey, this is our brand; this is where you buy our newspaper.’” That’s where “All the news that’s fit to print” comes from. Instead of yelling about whatever crazy story they’re inventing, you’re yelling about, “Hey, this is where you get The New York Times.”
I actually did look it up, and in the early 1900s The New York Times was experiencing tech levels of growth, like 10X-ing over a decade kind of stuff. So the New York Times was like the tech industry of the early 1900s.
It was a unicorn.
Like the OG analog unicorn.
I’m glad you brought this up because one thing people will say is, “Look, all media optimizes for engagement because you want people to click on your headlines.” And there’s some truth to that for sure, but at the same time, there’s a pretty hard limit to it. If you look at the front page of The New York Times today, one article is “Biden Signs Bill for Bolstering Infrastructure” and another one is “Europe Targets Unvaccinated in Virus Spike.” That’s not clickbait. There’s some judgment going on there about what’s important, what would be good for readers to know. It’s not purely about what will optimize the click rate. There are other values at play.
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