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upstart writes:

Content moderation is guided by profits and by ideology more than policy:

If there's anything that Elon Musk's Twitter saga and Twitter Files has shown us, its that content moderation by social media platforms is anything but straightforward. Social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook need to strike the balance between making a user's feed as engaging as possible, and keeping users, especially impressionable users away from harmful content. This is where most social media platforms fail miserably.

A previously unpublished document that has not been leaked from Meta, shows that the people heading Meta when it was still called Facebook, knew that Instagram was intentionally pushing young teenage girls to dangerous and harmful content, and did nothing to stop it.

The document reveals, how an Instagram employee ran an investigation on Instagram's algorithm and recommendations, by pretending to be a 13-year-old girl looking for diet tips. Instead of showing the user content from medical and proper fitness experts, the algorithm chose to show content from more viral topics that got more engagement, which was adjacent to having a proper diet. These "adjacent" viral topics turned out to be content around anorexia. The user was led to graphic content and recommendations to follow accounts titled "skinny binge" and "apple core anorexic."

[...] "Time after time, when they have an opportunity to choose between safety of our kids and profits, they always choose profits," said Bergman in an interview with a news agency in the US. He argues the design of social media platforms is ultimately hurting kids.

[...] "They have intentionally designed a product that is addictive," Bergman said. “They understand that if children stay online, they make more money. It doesn't matter how harmful the material is." Bergman argues the apps were explicitly designed to evade parental authority and is calling for better age and identity verification protocols.

Original Submission