QOTD -- Facebook's Addiction To Lies And Hate Speech

"By the time thousands of rioters stormed the US Capitol in January, organized in part on Facebook and fueled by the lies about a stolen election that had fanned out across the platform, it was clear from my conversations that the Responsible AI team had failed to make headway against misinformation and hate speech because it had never made those problems its main focus. More important, I realized, if it tried to, it would be set up for failure.

"The reason is simple. Everything the company does and chooses not to do flows from a single motivation: [CEO Mark] Zuckerberg’s relentless desire for growth... [snip]

"In other words, the Responsible AI team’s work—whatever its merits on the specific problem of tackling AI bias—is essentially irrelevant to fixing the bigger problems of misinformation, extremism, and political polarization. And it’s all of us who pay the price." -- Karen Hao, in "How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation, " today at Technology Review.com.  This is a deep dive into how Facebook's algorithms nurture lies and hate speech, and why the Facebook executive who created them is powerless to fix the problem.  Fascinating reading.