Annalice Ni

March 13th, 2020

CSE 492: Computer Ethics
Final Project

Communication has undergone immense transformations in the digital age, starting

from basic household telephones that have developed into computers that fit into most
peoples’ pockets. As a result of this innovation, content creation, dispersion and consumption
has changed drastically as well. Telephones allowed individuals living countries apart to reach
each other, but the creation of digital platforms has allowed regular individuals to reach the
entire global community at once. These changes have led to a multitude of different social
media, content creation, and messaging platforms becoming the staples of consumers’ lives.
Many businesses and freelancers depend on these platforms as a source of income, and even
more content consumers dedicate hours of their lives every day to watching and reading
algorithmically generated content and interacting with other people through digital means.
Facebook, like many other large tech corporations, has humble beginnings that have
become like folklore in the tech community. In late 2003, Mark Zuckerberg, then a sophomore
at Harvard, created a website called Facemash that contained the pictures of students to
compare their attractiveness. He and his cofounders launched a site called The Facebook for
Harvard students that later spread to college campuses across America. The summer of 2004,
Zuckerberg left Harvard and began developing Facebook in earnest in Palo Alto, where the
company started taking shape. The predecessor of what we know as the Facebook profile
timeline was introduced in September 2004, becoming a defining feature how users are
displayed on the platform. The iconic Facebook News Feed was launched in late 2006 and drew
concerns and outrage from users over the potential privacy issues it could bring. Perhaps one of
the most well-known icons in Silicon Valley, the Facebook Like button, was launched in 2009.
For the next decade, Facebook as a company and a platform grew immensely, acquiring other
companies to bolster their own ideas, introducing other apps that monopolize more of a user’s
screen time, and expanding the Facebook platform to be far more than just an unassuming app
that friends can use to keep up with one another’s lives.
The Facebook News Feed is an iconic example of a platform on which individuals and
groups freely engage with each other, but content moderation exists on the platform in the
presence of the news feed algorithm and flagging, which can change the user’s experience on
the platform. The backbone of the Facebook website and app, the News Feed consists of posts
that the user can scroll through. These posts originate from the user’s Facebook friends, famous
individuals or organizations they follow, groups that the user is following, etc. Interspersed
within these posts are ads that are targeted towards the user’s interests. The user can create
their own post, consisting of text, images, polls, and other media types, and post it. This will
add the post to their own news feed and the news feed of their friends and followers. The user
can also see posts that their friends reacted to or commented on, or content from the
publishers that their friends interact with, making the news feed a reflection of not just a user’s
own preferences, but also those of their Facebook friends.
The algorithm behind the Facebook News Feed is seemingly magical in that it orders a
user’s posts in ways that will keep them engaged in the app for longer periods of time.
According to the Facebook Help Center, the ranking of post ordering in the news feed depends
on a variety of influences. These influences include how often the user interacts with posts
from certain people or groups, the types of posts a user interacts with often (photo, text, links),
the popularity of the post, and the timing of the post, among a variety of other factors. In every
individual post, a pseudo score is calculated based on the importance of all of these factors to
the user. The pseudo score determines how high up on the user’s news feed the post will
display, which means that older but more personally relevant posts could display higher on a
user’s news feed than much newer and less relevant posts.
Although the news feed algorithm controls a major part of a user’s experience, the user
is able to customize their feed slightly by changing settings on who and what they follow. Users
can also hide posts, indicating to the algorithm that they want to see less posts of that type.
Since the news feed algorithm’s goal is to show the user posts that will engage them, this often
creates a bubble effect on the user’s Facebook experience in terms of the type of content that
they see, especially in the case of political information. Facebook’s success in creating a
platform that can engage its users also acts as a limitation in terms of the user’s exposure to the
rest of the world. It is not Facebook’s goal or job to expand the viewpoints of its users, but
targeting the news feed towards the user’s preferences too specifically has very tangible and
dangerous outcomes, such as a rise in the spread of conspiracy theories and political extreme
ideas.
Furthering the potential spread of misinformation, as Facebook’s target audience grew,
the interaction on Facebook has shifted from individual-to-individual interactions to individuals
interacting with companies, businesses, and even government entities, each with their own
agenda. This shift in scope, combined with the rise of the ad tech industry, allows companies to
directly target individual users based on their ad preferences. The typical Facebook News Feed
now is littered with aesthetic ads that have relatable taglines and natural-looking photos,
blending in with the other paraphernalia that a user sees on the app. It’s become so prevalent
that it is difficult to entirely distinguish between the ads and non-ads, the commercial and the
personal. Targeted advertising can have positive effects for both the companies and their
consumers because it allows consumers to spend more time looking at products that are
actually relevant and useful to them instead of completely arbitrary products. The system also
benefits the businesses using Facebook’s ad platforms since they are able to directly advertise
to users who would actually enjoy their product instead of wasting money on advertising to the
general public.
However, Facebook’s advertising ecosystem can be incredibly vulnerable to misuse and
propaganda, as seen in the case of the 2016 presidential election cycle in which Russian
government backed ads targeted millions of Americans to promote Donald Trump’s campaign.
In this case, a foreign government entity was able to successfully impact another sovereign
nation’s largest governmental election, which shows the incredible and terrifying influence that
Facebook has on its users. The Facebook News Feed’s algorithm already, inadvertently or not,
creates an ideological bubble for its users as it feeds them content they will likely respond
positively to, but the sponsored advertising somehow exacerbates this issue even further. More
concerningly perhaps, Zuckerberg seemed to dismiss the idea that fake news and propaganda
on Facebook had a significant impact on the 2016 election after Trump was elected, with the
discovery of the Russian ads happening after this comment.
 Although Facebook can argue that it is just a neutral platform that users and groups can
freely share content and create community in, the amount of impact the platform has had on
social movements, elections, and political entities around the globe in the past decade
contradicts this idea entirely. Of course the platform is not entirely ridden with propaganda and
belligerent hidden agents, and it can actually connect and empower individuals who have a
positive cause or message. Billions of users stay attached to Facebook’s product even with its
numerous faults and rocky PR periods, so the platform must have some perceived positive
effect on their lives. Still, we must ask who the platform is actually aiming to benefit as its
influence on reality grows stronger.
Facebook’s targeted advertising is almost as core to the platform as its iconic News Feed
now, and users have adapted to seeing “sponsored” posts during their experience on the
platform. This ad revenue plays a large role in keeping the Facebook platform alive and also
free, which is another major part of the experience on the platform. Other services, especially
those in streaming such as Youtube and Spotify, are also ad-driven, but they have created
subscription-based payment plan which users can pay monthly fees to keep their experience
add free. Facebook claims on its login page that the service will always be free, and their
success with profiting from targeted ads suggests that this claim will hold, but what if the
platform had a monthly paid subscription option that allowed a user to experience Facebook
entirely ad free?
On the surface, not much about a user’s experience on the platform would change in
terms of the design of the platform and the UI. However, users may see that their News Feed is
more populated with posts from individuals they know or groups that they follow instead of
corporate accounts and sponsored posts. This shift in dynamic could change the way Facebook
as a platform is perceived. The experience of using the application would feel more intimate –
like a neighborhood instead of a town square. Additionally, incidents like the Russian ads
influencing a US election would likely be more easily contained since less people would see
these ads. The downside to this subscription based system would be the accessibility of the
Facebook platform, and the self-selecting population that would actually pay to not see ads.
This would create a divide between those who are able to and choose to pay for the ad-free
subscription and users who cannot or don’t care enough to, and this grouping may cause even
further dissonance on the platform.