The primary aim of this study was to understand users’ different reaction patterns based on the five major Facebook reactions (i.e., love, haha, wow, sad, and angry). Accessed August 24, 2022.This study investigated 3.50 million Facebook reactions collected from 9,429 Bangladeshi news items about rape shared on social media from 2016 to 2021. 'More internal documents show how Facebook’s algorithm prioritized anger and posts that triggered it.' Nieman Journalism Lab. Retrieved August 24, 2022, from Ĭhakradhar, Shraddha.

More internal documents show how Facebook’s algorithm prioritized anger and posts that triggered it. Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, 26 Oct. Giving the reactions five times the value of a single like was Facebook’s effort to signal that “the post had made a greater emotional impression than a like reacting with an emoji took an extra step beyond the single click or tap of the like button.”Ĭhakradhar, Shraddha. the “angry” reaction (😡) dominates many pages, with “Fox News driving the most angry reactions of anyone, with nearly double that of anyone else.”įacebook introduced the suite of “reaction” emojis in response to a decline in people talking to each other on the social platform, according to the report.It has pushed up articles on divisive topics like abortion, religion, and guns.And in 2019, another report found some of the effects of Facebook’s change to prioritizing meaningful interactions: Back in 2017, a report found that hyper-political publishers were especially adept at provoking the anger of their readers. This isn’t the first time that “anger” has reared its ugly head as a useful metric. The power of the algorithmic promotion undermined the efforts of Facebook’s content moderators and integrity teams, who were fighting an uphill battle against toxic and harmful content. That means Facebook for three years systematically amped up some of the worst of its platform, making it more prominent in users’ feeds and spreading it to a much wider audience. One Facebook staffer, whose name was redacted in a dump of documents shared with the Securities and Exchange Commission by whistleblower and former Facebook employee Frances Haugen, had warned that this might happen they were proven right.Īccording to the Post, “The company’s data scientists confirmed in 2019 that posts that sparked angry reaction emoji were disproportionately likely to include misinformation, toxicity and low-quality news.” The problem with this plan for engagement: Other posts also likely to yield similar reactions were more likely to show up, only these posts were likely to also contain misinformation, spam, or forms of clickbait. More specifically, the ranking algorithm treated reactions such as “angry,” “love,” “sad,” and “wow” as five times more valuable than traditional “likes” on the social media platform. LINK: ➚ | Posted by: Shraddha Chakradhar | October 26, 2021Īs if there wasn’t enough Facebook news to digest already, another deep dive from The Washington Post this morning revealed that Facebook engineers changed the company’s algorithm to prioritize and elevate posts that elicited emoji reactions - many of which were rolled out in 2017.

Emoticons for angry face for facebook