Are You There, User? It’s Me, Facebook!

There was also a time not so long ago when Facebook’s emails contained the entirety of the things they described: the post, or the photo, or, at least, the text of that “message” from a friend.

And, sure, my inbox is otherwise full of solicitations from various companies to buy their products or use their services or read their content. They share a set of obvious tactics: overpromising and underdelivering; creating unnecessary mystery in subject lines; manufacturing urgency at commodity scale.

In aggregate, over time, these thousands of solicitations and misdirections have gently but constantly made my inbox a worse place. I’ve dealt with this by using a combination of filters, new email apps and rationalization. It’s a situation much like the one Facebook has struggled with for years on its own service.

Since the advent of the News Feed — it was about a dozen years ago that the company created a stream of content for its users to endure — Facebook has made clear its disdain for what it has called, variously, “low-quality content,” “low-quality web page experiences” or, occasionally, “engagement bait.”

Facebook may insist that it was taken by surprise by the political actors that have abused its platform, and that it has been waging an open war against deceptive, manipulative or inauthentic content on its service for years. Recently, it has become more comfortable in asserting what presentations of content are acceptable. In May 2017, the company told page operators:

We hear from our community that they’re disappointed when they click on a link in News Feed that leads to a web page that contains little substantive content, and is covered in disruptive, shocking or malicious ads.

Sounds annoying! Later that year, Adam Mosseri, then the vice president of News Feed, and now in charge of Instagram, wrote, in part:

Today we are making an update to help reduce low quality links in News Feed. We are always working to improve people’s experience in News Feed by showing more stories that we think people will find informative and entertaining.

Our research shows that there is a tiny group of people on Facebook who routinely share vast amounts of public posts per day, effectively spamming people’s feeds. Our research further shows that the links they share tend to include low quality content such as clickbait, sensationalism, and misinformation.

It would be terrible if someone did this to something I use on a daily basis. Arrest them, please! Here’s Mark Zuckerberg, in a 2018 interview with Vox:

There was this issue with clickbait, where there were a bunch of publications that would push content into Facebook, [and] people would click on them because they had sensational titles but then would not feel good about having read that content.

People who “would not feel good” about content they expect to be “sensational” sounds like a tiny but probably less than optimal experience, and it would be a shame if it happened all the time!

Facebook has also long warned its advertisers — abuse from whom the platform has had much less trouble detecting or anticipating — to be careful. On a page titled “Avoid Creating Negative Experiences for People Who See Your Ads,” the company lists “attributes of landing pages and ad content that people consider low quality and associate with negative experiences.”