BiasMedium
Facebook "News Feed" Allegedly Boosted Misinformation and Violating Content Following Use of MSI Metric
- Occurred
- Oct 1, 2018
- Published
- Sep 15, 2021
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
After the “News Feed” algorithm had been overhauled to boost engagement between friends and family in early 2018, its heavy weighting of re-shared content was alleged found by company researchers to have pushed content creators to reorient their posts towards outrage and sensationalism, causing a proliferation of misinformation, toxicity, and violent content.
Developers
Deployers
Harmed parties
- Facebook users
- Facebook content creators
Classification
Category confidence: 85%
Severity confidence: 90%
Rationale: Algorithmic bias in content recommendation led to misinformation and toxicity proliferation.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8