Social media giants made decisions which allowed more harmful content on people’s feeds, after internal research into their algorithms showed how outrage fuelled engagement, whistleblowers told the BBC.
More than a dozen whistleblowers and insiders have laid bare how the companies took risks with safety on issues including violence, sexual blackmail and terrorism as they battled for users’ attention.
An engineer at Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, described how he had been told by senior management to allow more “borderline” harmful content - which includes misogyny and conspiracy theories - in user’s feeds to compete with TikTok.
“They sort of told us that it’s because the stock price is down,” the engineer said.
A TikTok employee gave the BBC rare access to the company’s internal dashboards of user complaints - as well as other evidence of how staff had been instructed to prioritise several cases involving politicians over a series of reports of harmful posts featuring children.
Decisions were being made to “maintain a strong relationship” with political figures to avoid threats of regulation or bans, not because of the risks to users, the TikTok staffer said.
The algorithms are so fine tuned these days that by swiping once to see the next video you can no longer stop. I spent 40 minutes this morning watching reels after thinking to myself that I’ll stop after a couple videos, then I’ll make some coffee and have breakfast. After realizing that I wasted my morning I uninstalled the app. My friends will have to send me memes through other channels now.
I did the same thing. I was bad about wasting time on reels. Now, I’m much happier enjoying reading, gaming, and little diy projects. All the giant social media apps are vying for your attention. They’re designed to grab your attention and retain it. For those of us with addictive traits, it ends with mindlessly scrolling. The act of scrolling is inherently easy, so you put no effort to consuming.
I feel this makes you less intelligent, in a way. You become so trained to have instant gratification, that when things take longer in real life, your brain starts panicking. It gets stressful much quicker, because the world isn’t instant. All that to say, I’m about to delete Discord too and just call it all off.