Facebooks dark pattern design, public relations and internal work culture

Abstract

Facebook is criticized for various issues including privacy, dark patterns, false information, and user polarization.
According to leaked documents, there is a gap between official PR and internal discussions and research.
Analyzing these problems by analyzing leaked documents and published news articles

Facebook’s active users are 2.9B, using an average of 38 minutes per day based on 2020
According to materials submitted by employee Frances Haugen to the Securities and Exchange Commission and The Wall Street Journal in September 2021, Facebook was experiencing many internal problems.

RQs:

What type of dark pattern designs Facebook inc. has applied to their site’s recommendation algorithm and News Feed?

Dark patterns (omitted)

Facebook, News Feed and engagement

In the early days, Facebook was a dictionary-like site where people posted their hobbies, education, interests, relationships, etc. on their pages. Before that, it was “Facemesh,” a site that posted the faces of female college students without their consent and voted on their popularity (2003). After that, the name was changed to TheFacebook (2004) and then changed back to facebook (2005). —ak
A “feed” first appeared in 2007. A space to collect status updates from acquaintances
In 2011, “Feed” changed to “News Feed” and became the core experience of Facebook. Collects information from various pages and profiles and displays it dynamically
Starting from 2009 the feed was not in chronological order and added a “Like” button.
Other reactions (Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, Angry) were added in 2016. This information is used to expose more ‘emotion heavy’ content
This series of changes increased engagement, but also caused various problems.

Hate speech, polarization, and information bubbles

Facebook invested heavily in research to automatically remove Hate speech (13B). A state of arms race between hate speechers and algorithms. For now, the humans posting hate speech have the upper hand
The manual work of human moderators is also important. The human problem is moderator bias. Facebook Korea is particularly famous for having serious gender bias issues. Some users call Facebook Blue Ilbe —ak

ToDo