Description: 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.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Facebook developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Facebook users and Facebook content creators.
Incident Stats
Incident ID
164
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2018-10-01
Editors
Sean McGregor, Khoa Lam
Applied Taxonomies
CSETv1 Taxonomy Classifications
Taxonomy DetailsIncident Number
The number of the incident in the AI Incident Database.
164
CSETv1_Annotator-1 Taxonomy Classifications
Taxonomy DetailsIncident Number
The number of the incident in the AI Incident Database.
164
Special Interest Intangible Harm
An assessment of whether a special interest intangible harm occurred. This assessment does not consider the context of the intangible harm, if an AI was involved, or if there is characterizable class or subgroup of harmed entities. It is also not assessing if an intangible harm occurred. It is only asking if a special interest intangible harm occurred.
yes
Date of Incident Year
The year in which the incident occurred. If there are multiple harms or occurrences of the incident, list the earliest. If a precise date is unavailable, but the available sources provide a basis for estimating the year, estimate. Otherwise, leave blank.
Enter in the format of YYYY
2018
Date of Incident Month
The month in which the incident occurred. If there are multiple harms or occurrences of the incident, list the earliest. If a precise date is unavailable, but the available sources provide a basis for estimating the month, estimate. Otherwise, leave blank.
Enter in the format of MM
Estimated Date
“Yes” if the data was estimated. “No” otherwise.
Yes
Multiple AI Interaction
“Yes” if two or more independently operating AI systems were involved. “No” otherwise.
no
CSETv1_Annotator-3 Taxonomy Classifications
Taxonomy DetailsIncident Number
The number of the incident in the AI Incident Database.
164
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
wsj.com · 2021
- View the original report at its source
- View the report at the Internet Archive
In the fall of 2018, Jonah Peretti, chief executive of online publisher BuzzFeed, emailed a top official at Facebook Inc. The most divisive content that publishers produced was going viral on the platform, he said, creating an incentive to …
Variants
A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.
