Facebook "News Feed" Allegedly Boosted Misinformation and Violating Content Following Use of MSI Metric

October 1, 2018

In early 2018, Facebook's News Feed algorithm overhaul resulted in a focus on engagement between friends and family. However, company researchers reported that the heavy weighting of re-shared content potentially led content creators to shift their posts towards outrage and sensationalism, consequently increasing the spread of misinformation, toxicity, and violent content. This underscores the need for robust AI governance and safe and secure practices in AI design.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.673, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.662, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
GOVERN 1.1 — similarity 0.653, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: facebook
Alleged developer: facebook
Alleged harmed parties: facebook-users, facebook-content-creators

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/164

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

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