Tip 2 - Content quality has plummeted as platforms cut back on safety
Academic researchers found that on the eve of the 2020 US Presidential Election, 23% of political image posts on Facebook contained misinformation.
Mass layoffs and removal of important safety rules drops the quality of content on your feed
They also found a 23% increase in views of content that “repeatedly violated” Facebook’s rules relative to the start of 2020, and a more than 10% rise in content categorized as “ideologically extreme”.
The high levels of false and low-quality information present were the result of a long-term policy stance to prioritize profits over engagement."
This year, we expect content quality to decline even further as Big Tech heavily cut back on safety capabilities in 2023:
Layoffs of c.40,000 employees across platforms hit Trust & Safety teams especially hard
Platforms axed 17 critical policies which curbed hate speech, harassment and misinformation
· Meta’s layoffs of 21,000 jobs “had an outsized effect on the company’s Trust & Safety work”. This included dissolving a fact-checking tool that would let third-party fact checkers, such as the Associated press to add comments to articles as a way verify their trustworthiness
· X (formerly Twitter) fired 80% of engineers dedicated to Trust and Safety following Elon Musk’s takeover
· Google laid off one-third of a unit aiming to protect society from misinformation, radicalization, toxicity and censorship
