The Facebook Papers
In the fall of 2021, members of the U.S. Congress and hundreds of Western journalists obtained access to a collection of internal Facebook documents. The trove of research reports, proposals, presentations, and employee conversations would form the foundation for dozens of news stories describing Facebook’s own awareness of the real-world harms that resulted from its relentless pursuit of its users’ attention.
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(links added by me)
These documents offer an unfiltered, if fragmented, look at years’ worth of attempts by Facebook to assign emotional value to every swipe and click in its app. This process, which has an outsized impact on the kinds of information most frequently seen on the platform, is known as ranking. It underpins one of Facebook’s core features: the News Feed (or just the “Feed,” as the company now prefers we call it).
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