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.

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[–] 5 points 7 months ago (1 child)

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.

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    5 comments in c/technology@lemmy.world view that post
    [–] 16 points 7 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago*

    emotional contagion

    If that doesn't sum up all of social media for the past decade, I can't think of a better term.

    This is no different than the tobacco companies discovering that tobacco was bad and then sitting on the data and muddying the waters for decades so that they could make profit... but instead of lung cancers, Zuckerberg's machine is causing genocide and destroying democracies.

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  • [–] 8 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Well yeah, look who created it on the first place. The Propaganda Country.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago

    I am Jack's complete lack of surprise

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  • 3 comments in c/world view that post
    [–] 17 points 7 months ago

    You can't risk something you never cared about in the first place.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago

    “….risks safety to win digital drug arms race”*

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    The company invested in 700 staff to grow Reels, while safety teams were refused two specialist staff to deal with protecting children and 10 more to help with the integrity of elections.

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  • 2 comments in c/hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se view that post
    [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    2000s: we have web forums where people can talk to each other about anything they want, without any sort of corporate control or government censorship! this is awesome, we are living in the future! we should all make sure to preserve and expand this!

    2020s:

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago
    1 comment in c/fark@ibbit.at view that post
    [–] 4 points 7 months ago

    I thought we knew this as early as the 2010s when Facebook was doing it. Algo-focused social media has been a cesspool pretty much from the start

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