Facebook resisted changes meant to dial back viral content, report says – By Queenie Wong (CNET) / Oct 23 2021
Leaked company documents are providing more insight into how Facebook moderates political content.
Ahead of the 2020 US presidential election, Facebook executives reportedly resisted efforts to dial back features that help amplify false and inflammatory content because they feared doing so could harm the platform’s usage and growth.
The Wall Street Journal, citing leaked internal documents, said Facebook’s employees suggested changes that could slow the spread of viral content, such as killing the reshare button or stopping the promotion of reshared content unless it was from a user’s friend. A proponent of making these types of changes has been Kang-Xing Jin, who heads Facebook’s health initiatives, according to the report. But executives such as John Hegeman, Facebook’s head of ads, raised concerns about stifling viral content.
“If we remove a small percentage of reshares from people’s inventory, they decide to come back to Facebook less,” Hegeman wrote in internal communications cited by the Journal.
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