riyerFollowing up on @Jhorwitzz's excellent article about FB's efforts to change its relationship to political content, I wrote this follow-up on what we can learn from this work. https://psychoftech.substack.com/p/when-should-companies-optimize-for
To build on this work showing how deprecating engagement incentives for sensitive topics improves outcomes for users and society, I'm hopeful we can 1) Audit algorithms across platforms for perverse engagement incentives (see this post for more on how: https://psychoftech.substack.com/p/defining-meaningful-algorithmic-transparency), 2) Align on a societal definition of sensitive content - This work relies on a common definition of what content we feel should or should not be optimized for engagement. Ideally, these lines are drawn by the world, not by private companies, and 3) Decide on alternative incentives for important topics - There are kinds of engagement that likely are more aligned with user value (e.g. explicit positive reactions from diverse audiences) and we should study those as potential alternatives.
