You Are Promoting Content You Hate

“I’m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions.” -Mark Zuckerberg

Social platforms have algorithms that decide what content you can see based on their company goals. I’m sure you know that intuitively. That’s why you’re way more likely to see that beautiful video of your sister’s wedding than the ‘used car for sale’ video from that guy from your high school gym class. If a post is getting likes, comments, or causing people to spend more time on the profile or site, the post will be surfaced to others more often.

This year many brands saw a drastic decline in views and engagement, not-so-suspiciously after Mark Zuckerberg mentioned an algorithmic change to focus on “more meaningful social interactions.” But what does the platform consider ‘meaningful’? I decided to put it to a Facebook test:

The goal of this post was three-fold:

1.    Make it very easy to comment.

2.    Ensure consistent comments over a long period of time.

3.    Encourage comments that are as random and non-meaningful as possible.

Ultimately, I wanted to replicate the worst kind of post interaction: few comments or likes on other comments, little variety in posts, and, after the first few days, almost no interaction from the original poster (me). So without meaningful interactions, the post should have disappeared quickly, right?

This was posted exactly two weeks ago, and as it stands it has 66 reactions and over 2,000 comments. Many friends and family members are still posting that it’s at the top of their feed, many who have posted dozens of times:

The longest a comment ever lasted as the ‘newest’ was two hours. The most engagement under a post from two friends re-connecting was eight sub-comments. After about a week, almost all comments were either gifs about how much they hated the posts or posts asking me to kill the original post. And to reward me for creating a post that was almost universally hated (sans a few that badly wanted the unnamed ‘prize’), Facebook gave me a post with 200x+ engagement compared to my average post and ongoing engagement on future posts from many super-commenters.

As my friends and family hate my post more, Facebook loves my post more. My post is the boyfriend with the motorcycle and the face tattoo and it’s taking Facebook’s algorithm to prom.

But it doesn’t stop at begging for comments within posts. You can also see this within the comments section. As an experiment, pick a random politician and expand the comments. Generally, you will see a comment with the most sub-comments, and often this comment will be against the politician. It’s human nature: if you see a comment you agree with you’ll like it, but if you see a comment you disagree with you’ll want to explain with a comment why you disagree. This will algorithmically boost the comment you disagree with without necessarily surfacing your own comment.

Outside of the Facebook ecosystem, you can see this phenomenon through viral sharing. In September of 2015, YouTube vlogger Nicole Arbour posted a video named ‘Dear Fat People’ that many saw as a video of a cruel bully punching down as the Body-Acceptance Movement was gaining momentum. The video was first put on my radar when YouTuber Grace Helbig posted a video response about how awful the video made her feel. At that time, the video was at 600,000 views. At the time of this writing, the video was over 13 million views and Nicole Arbour’s per-video views went from reliably under 100,000 to reliably over 300,000. The ‘Dear Fat People’ video performed so well that she created a ‘Dear Fat People 2’ to try to recapture her magic, which did to some degree at 2.4 million views. Without promotion in the form of repudiation by Grace, Liza Koshy, Shane Dawson, Boogie, and countless others, Nicole Arbour’s video would have had a fraction of total views, and those videos reignited her career allowing her to profit from creating similar videos.

This isn’t new. It’s the reason why Phineas T. Barnum said, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” But this is different. Now algorithms pick winner-content and loser-content based on whether or not content is causing discussion, whether it’s meaningful discussion or hate-fueled rants. This will favor content like mine that beg for easy comments, content like Nicole Arbour that demand righteous indignation, or anything that can create a flame war within the comments like most politicians. In all cases, you are acting as a recommendation engine for content that you actively dislike.

So what does this mean for you, as a social media patron who wishes to see the best content whenever possible? I need to request something of you. It’s hypocritical to ask as I’ve fallen into this trap multiple times in the past 24 hours:

You need to ignore junky content. And inflammatory content. And if it’s fake news and you know it’s fake news, you need to flag instead of comment or the algorithm will think your “this is all lies!” comment is screaming to the platform, “show this to all of my friends!”

And, in the meantime, remember that platforms have done a historically terrible job identifying ‘meaningful social interactions’. If you want your content to be seen, you can game the algorithm with a simple and clear call-to-action asking for comments that doesn’t require much thought. And if you’re a viewer, use your great comment-power with great comment-responsibility.

Now please comment below with the first letter of your first name!

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Phil Ranta is a digital media executive from Studio71, Fullscreen, and VivaVision who has consulted on digital strategy and optimization for hundreds of top social video creators. You can follow him on Twitter @philranta