The infamous ‘Facebook Files’ internal data leak highlighted and revealed various issues and concerns plaguing the platform. Among these were claims suggesting that content sharing on Facebook as being one of the most harmful actions, given the ease at which people get a sense of satisfaction simply by hitting the ‘Share’ button.
These claims were only made more evident with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen stating that that platform’s own research data shows that the ‘Share’ option is harmful, with an indirect emphasis on the amplification of re-shares.
Alex Kantrowitz reports in his Big Technology newsletter:
“The report noted that people are four times more likely to see misinformation when they encounter a post via a share of a share – kind of like a retweet of a retweet – compared to a typical photo or link on Facebook. Add a few more shares to the chain, and people are five to ten times more likely to see misinformation. It gets worse in certain countries. In India, people who encounter “deep reshares,” as the researchers call them, are twenty times more likely to see misinformation.”
To simplify, content that see repeated shares are more likely to have some form of misinformation. This isn’t too surprising though, seeing as how such content often makes use of several subliminals and innuendos, all of which are highly influential. However, the most important thing to consider here is what Facebook, and in a broader sense Meta, will do in order to address these issues.
“To address possible viral content, we’re continuing to reduce content that has been shared by a chain of two or more people. We’re also continuing to reduce the distribution of content that our proactive detection technology identifies as likely to violate our policies against hate speech as well as from accounts that have recently and repeatedly posted violating content.”
That’s right, Meta will actually be imposing certain sharing restrictions as gleaned from its findings. On this note, wouldn’t it be a more logical move to totally remove the ‘Share’ option entirely? Users would still be able to technically ‘Share’ without it, at least in the following sense:
Users will be able to post article links in personal posts.
Users will still be able to like and react to others’ posts, improving exposure through continued engagement activities.
Users will still be able to comment on posts, increasing engagement and encouraging relevant discussions.
If Facebook itself, backed by actual research data, finds that sharing and re-sharing significantly contribute to the rapid spread of questionable and otherwise fallacious information, then wouldn’t totally removing the option help slow down the circulation of such posts? Ideally, yes, as exhibited by Twitter’s decision to remove direct retweeting October 1 of last year, leading up to the Presidential Election.
The Wrap
Twitter’s efforts did have a certain impact. Reinstating regular tweets in December of the same year, it notes that the use of ‘Quote Tweets’ increased, even with 45% of them including single-word confirmations, with another 70% having less than 25 characters. The important observation to note here is that the absence of a quick reshare option meant that people had to think and instead come up with more personalized posts, leading to hesitance in sharing activity, thus reducing the likelihood to circulate harmful and even totally bogus information.
To an extent, Facebook is now adapting the same tactic, highlighting the value in such an approach. While removing the option to share will no doubt impact the economic performance or certain business partners, such a tradeoff is sometimes necessary to uphold community safety and integrity, which is an equally important aspect of longevity and progress. Besides, Facebook, as it approaches the Metaverse, does say that it’ll put more emphasis on audience appeasement and retention, making a focus to reduce audience-harming elements a platform priority.
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