Meta, née Facebook, had a rough year in 2021, in public opinion if not financially. Revelations from whistleblower Frances Haugen, first detailed in a Wall Street Journal investigative series and then presented in congressional testimony, show that the company was aware of the harm it was causing.
Growing concerns about misinformation, emotional manipulation and psychological harm came to a head this year when Haugen released internal company documents showing that the company’s own research confirmed the societal and individual harm its Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms cause.
The Conversation gathered four articles from our archives that delve into research that explains Meta’s problematic behavior.
1. Addicted to engagement
At the root of Meta’s harmfulness is its set of algorithms, the rules the company uses to choose what content you see. The algorithms are designed to boost the company’s profits, but they also allow misinformation to thrive.
The algorithms work by increasing engagement – in other words, by provoking a response from the company’s users. Indiana University’s Filippo Menczer, who studies the spread of information and misinformation in social networks, explains that engagement plays into people’s tendency to favor posts that seem popular. “When social media tells people an item is going viral, their cognitive biases kick in and translate into the irresistible urge to pay attention to it and share it,” he wrote.
One result is that low-quality information that gets an initial boost can garner more attention than it otherwise deserves. Worse, this dynamic can be gamed by people aiming to spread misinformation.
“People aiming to manipulate the information market have created fake accounts, like trolls and social bots, and organized fake networks,” Menczer wrote. “They have flooded the network to create the appearance that a conspiracy theory or a political candidate is popular, tricking both platform algorithms and people’s cognitive biases at once.”
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Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testified that the company’s algorithms are dangerous – here’s how they can manipulate you
2. Kneecapping teen girls’ self-esteem
Some of the most disturbing revelations concern the harm Meta’s Instagram social media platform causes adolescents, particularly teen girls. University of Kentucky psychologist Christia Spears Brown explains that Instagram can lead teens to objectify themselves by focusing on how their bodies appear to others. It also can lead them to make unrealistic comparisons of themselves with celebrities and filtered and retouched images of their peers.
Even when teens know the comparisons are unrealistic, they end up feeling worse about themselves. “Even in studies in which participants knew the photos they were shown on Instagram were retouched and reshaped, adolescent girls still felt worse about their bodies after…
