Google is unlikely to be trying to radicalize YouTube viewers. I don’t believe Facebook was, either. Instead, the explanation is that by serving up more extreme content, you encourage people to keep clicking, keep watching, keep spending time on site. What’s the best way to do that? Serve them something more exciting or incendiary than what they started with....The most depressing thing about the 2016 election, to me personally, wasn’t the victor (or the defeated candidate). The most depressing thing about the 2016 election was the number of people who thought a badly shot, unsourced YouTube video from whatever meatsack they personally favored constituted proof of evil activities carried out by either Donald Drumpf or Hillary Clinton.
There is an argument that lifts the burden of blame from Facebook’s shoulders by arguing that these outcomes were unpredictable or unknown. This is untrue. The study of propaganda and disinformation campaigns and how they spread is decades old. While the amount of research focused on the intersection of social media and propaganda has exploded since 2016, there were forerunners, like the Computational Propaganda project, that set out to analyze how algorithms, automation, and computational propaganda impacted public life beginning in 2012.
Facebook had no way of knowing the exact particulars of what it might unleash — but more than enough information existed to show that the company ought to behave cautiously. It did not. It was easier to focus on pushing growth than to consider where and what that growth might be coming from.
By choosing to take no action at any point during its own early boom or replacement of much of the traditional news media, it chose to advance a set of values in which truthful, accurate reporting was easily replaced with flagrant displays of bullshit. The platform was candy to those seeking to earn a buck with no regard for the truth of the information they peddled.
https://www.extremetech.com/internet/280738-no-one-wants-to-talk-about-how-completely-we-were-lied-to
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