facebook users essay

Essay On Facebook

500 words essay on facebook.

Facebook has become one of the most famous social networking sites. However, it comes with its own sets of pros and cons. While it has helped a lot of individuals and business to create their brand, it is also being used for wrong activities. Through an essay on Facebook, we will go through all this in detail.

Benefits of Facebook

Facebook is experiencing dramatic growth currently where the number of users has reached one billion. It comes with a lot of benefits like video calling with your close ones and uploading your photos and videos without charge.

Most importantly, it allows you to get in touch with people from the other side of the world without spending a penny. It is also a great way to connect with old school friends and college friends.

Further, you can also make new friends through this platform. When you connect with people from all over the world, it opens doors to learning about new cultures, values and traditions from different countries.

It also gives you features for group discussions and chatting. Now, Facebook also allows users to sell their products or services through their site. It is a great way of increasing sales and establishing your business online.

Thus, it gives you new leads and clients. Facebook Ads help you advertise your business and target your audience specifically. Similarly, it also has gaming options for you to enjoy when you are getting bored.

Most importantly, it is also a great source of information and news. It helps in staying updated with the latest happenings in the world and subscribing to popular fan pages to get the latest updates.

Drawbacks of Facebook

While it does offer many advantages, it also gives you many drawbacks. First of all, it compromises your privacy at great lengths. Many cases have been filed regarding the same issue.

Further, you are at risk of theft if you use it for online banking and more. Similarly, it also gives virus attacks. A seemingly harmless link may activate a virus in your computer without you knowing.

Moreover, you also get spam emails because of Facebook which may be frustrating at times. The biggest disadvantage has to be child pornography. It gives access to a lot of pornographic photos and videos.

Similarly, it is also a great place for paedophiles to connect with minors and lure them easily under false pretence. A lot of hackers also use Facebook for hacking into people’s personal information and gaining from it.

Another major drawback is Facebook addiction . It is like an abyss that makes you scroll endlessly. You waste so much time on there without even realizing that it hampers the productivity of your life by taking more away from you than giving.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of the Essay on Facebook

To sum it up, if we use Facebook in the right proportions and with proper care, it can be a powerful tool for anyone. Moreover, it can be great for marketing and networking. Further, any business can also leverage its power to make its business success. But, it is essential to remember to not let it become an addiction.

FAQ of Essay on Facebook

Question 1: What is the purpose of Facebook?

Answer 1: The purpose of Facebook is to allow people to build a community and make the world a smaller place. It helps to connect with friends and family and also discover all the latest happenings in the world.

Question 2: What is the disadvantage of Facebook?

Answer 2: Facebook is potentially addictive and can hamper the productivity of people. Moreover, it also makes you vulnerable to malware and viruses. Moreover, it has also given rise to identity theft.

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How Facebook Fails 90 Percent of Its Users

Internal documents show the company routinely placing public-relations, profit, and regulatory concerns over user welfare. And if you think it’s bad here, look beyond the U.S.

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I n the fall of 2019 , Facebook launched a massive effort to combat the use of its platforms for human trafficking. Working around the clock, its employees searched Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram for keywords and hashtags that promoted domestic servitude in the Middle East and elsewhere. Over the course of a few weeks, the company took down 129,191 pieces of content, disabled more than 1,000 accounts, tightened its policies, and added new ways to detect this kind of behavior. After they were through, employees congratulated one another on a job well done.

It was a job well done. It just came a little late. In fact, a group of Facebook researchers focused on the Middle East and North Africa had found numerous Instagram profiles being used as advertisements for trafficked domestic servants as early as March 2018. “Indonesian brought with Tourist Visa,” one photo caption on a picture of a woman reads, in Arabic. “We have more of them.” But these profiles weren’t “actioned”—disabled or taken down—an internal report would explain, because Facebook’s policies “did not acknowledge the violation.” A year and a half later, an undercover BBC investigation revealed the full scope of the problem: a broad network that illegally trafficked domestic workers, facilitated by internet platforms and aided by algorithmically boosted hashtags. In response, Facebook banned one hashtag and took down some 700 Instagram profiles. But according to another internal report, “domestic servitude content remained on the platform.”

Not until October 23, 2019, did the hammer drop: Apple threatened to pull Facebook and Instagram from its App Store because of the BBC report. Motivated by what employees describe in an internal document as “potentially severe consequences to the business” that would result from an App Store ban, Facebook finally kicked into high gear. The document makes clear that the decision to act was not the result of new information: “Was this issue known to Facebook before BBC enquiry and Apple escalation? Yes.”

The document was part of the disclosure made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by Frances Haugen, the whistleblower and former Facebook data scientist. A consortium of more than a dozen news organizations, including The Atlantic , has reviewed the redacted versions.

Reading these documents is a little like going to the eye doctor and seeing the world suddenly sharpen into focus. In the United States, Facebook has facilitated the spread of misinformation, hate speech, and political polarization. It has algorithmically surfaced false information about conspiracy theories and vaccines, and was instrumental in the ability of an extremist mob to attempt a violent coup at the Capitol. That much is now painfully familiar.

But these documents show that the Facebook we have in the United States is actually the platform at its best. It’s the version made by people who speak our language and understand our customs, who take our civic problems seriously because those problems are theirs too. It’s the version that exists on a free internet, under a relatively stable government, in a wealthy democracy. It’s also the version to which Facebook dedicates the most moderation resources. Elsewhere, the documents show, things are different. In the most vulnerable parts of the world—places with limited internet access, where smaller user numbers mean bad actors have undue influence—the trade-offs and mistakes that Facebook makes can have deadly consequences.

A ccording to the documents, Facebook is aware that its products are being used to facilitate hate speech in the Middle East, violent cartels in Mexico, ethnic cleansing in Ethiopia, extremist anti-Muslim rhetoric in India, and sex trafficking in Dubai. It is also aware that its efforts to combat these things are insufficient. A March 2021 report notes, “We frequently observe highly coordinated, intentional activity … by problematic actors” that is “particularly prevalent—and problematic—in At-Risk Countries and Contexts”; the report later acknowledges, “Current mitigation strategies are not enough.”

Read: What Facebook did to American democracy

In some cases, employees have successfully taken steps to address these problems, but in many others, the company response has been slow and incomplete. As recently as late 2020, an internal Facebook report found that only 6 percent of Arabic-language hate content on Instagram was detected by Facebook’s systems. Another report that circulated last winter found that, of material posted in Afghanistan that was classified as hate speech within a 30-day range, only 0.23 percent was taken down automatically by Facebook’s tools. In both instances, employees blamed company leadership for insufficient investment.

In many of the world’s most fragile nations, a company worth hundreds of billions of dollars hasn’t invested enough in the language- and dialect-specific artificial intelligence and staffing it needs to address these problems. Indeed, last year, according to the documents, only 13 percent of Facebook’s misinformation-moderation staff hours were devoted to the non-U.S. countries in which it operates, whose populations comprise more than 90 percent of Facebook’s users. (Facebook declined to tell me how many countries it has users in.) And although Facebook users post in at least 160 languages, the company has built robust AI detection in only a fraction of those languages, the ones spoken in large, high-profile markets such as the U.S. and Europe—a choice, the documents show, that means problematic content is seldom detected.

The granular, procedural, sometimes banal back-and-forth exchanges recorded in the documents reveal, in unprecedented detail, how the most powerful company on Earth makes its decisions. And they suggest that, all over the world, Facebook’s choices are consistently driven by public perception, business risk, the threat of regulation, and the specter of “PR fires,” a phrase that appears over and over in the documents. In many cases, Facebook has been slow to respond to developing crises outside the United States and Europe until its hand is forced. “It’s an open secret … that Facebook’s short-term decisions are largely motivated by PR and the potential for negative attention,” an employee named Sophie Zhang wrote in a September 2020 internal memo about Facebook’s failure to act on global misinformation threats. (Most employee names have been redacted for privacy reasons in these documents, but Zhang left the company and came forward as a whistleblower after she wrote this memo.)

Sometimes, even negative attention isn’t enough. In 2019, the human-rights group Avaaz found that Bengali Muslims in India’s Assam state were “facing an extraordinary chorus of abuse and hate” on Facebook: Posts calling Muslims “pigs,” rapists,” and “terrorists” were shared tens of thousands of times and left on the platform because Facebook’s artificial-intelligence systems weren’t built to automatically detect hate speech in Assamese, which is spoken by 23 million people. Facebook removed 96 of the 213 “clearest examples” of hate speech Avaaz flagged for the company before publishing its report. Facebook still does not have technology in place to automatically detect Assamese hate speech.

In a memo dated December 2020 and posted to Workplace, Facebook’s very Facebooklike internal message board, an employee argued that “Facebook’s decision-making on content policy is routinely influenced by political considerations.” To hear this employee tell it, the problem was structural: Employees who are primarily tasked with negotiating with governments over regulation and national security, and with the press over stories, were empowered to weigh in on conversations about building and enforcing Facebook’s rules regarding questionable content around the world. “Time and again,” the memo quotes a Facebook researcher saying, “I’ve seen promising interventions … be prematurely stifled or severely constrained by key decisionmakers—often based on fears of public and policy stakeholder responses.”

Among the consequences of that pattern, according to the memo: The Hindu-nationalist politician T. Raja Singh, who posted to hundreds of thousands of followers on Facebook calling for India’s Rohingya Muslims to be shot—in direct violation of Facebook’s hate-speech guidelines—was allowed to remain on the platform despite repeated requests to ban him, including from the very Facebook employees tasked with monitoring hate speech. A 2020 Wall Street Journal article reported that Facebook’s top public-policy executive in India had raised concerns about backlash if the company were to do so, saying that cracking down on leaders from the ruling party might make running the business more difficult. The company eventually did ban Singh, but not before his posts ping-ponged through the Hindi-speaking world.

In a Workplace thread apparently intended to address employee frustration after the Journal article was published, a leader explained that Facebook’s public-policy teams “are important to the escalations process in that they provide input on a range of issues, including translation, socio-political context, and regulatory risks of different enforcement options.”

Adrienne LaFrance: The largest autocracy on Earth

Employees weren’t placated. In dozens and dozens of comments, they questioned the decisions Facebook had made regarding which parts of the company to involve in content moderation, and raised doubts about its ability to moderate hate speech in India. They called the situation “sad” and Facebook’s response “inadequate,” and wondered about the “propriety of considering regulatory risk” when it comes to violent speech.

“I have a very basic question,” wrote one worker. “Despite having such strong processes around hate speech, how come there are so many instances that we have failed? It does speak on the efficacy of the process.”

Two other employees said that they had personally reported certain Indian accounts for posting hate speech. Even so, one of the employees wrote, “they still continue to thrive on our platform spewing hateful content.”

We “cannot be proud as a company,” yet another wrote, “if we continue to let such barbarism flourish on our network.”

T aken together, Frances Haugen’s leaked documents show Facebook for what it is: a platform racked by misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy thinking, extremism, hate speech, bullying, abuse, human trafficking, revenge porn, and incitements to violence. It is a company that has pursued worldwide growth since its inception—and then, when called upon by regulators, the press, and the public to quell the problems its sheer size has created, it has claimed that its scale makes completely addressing those problems impossible. Instead, Facebook’s 60,000-person global workforce is engaged in a borderless, endless, ever-bigger game of whack-a-mole, one with no winners and a lot of sore arms.

Sophie Zhang was one of the people playing that game. Despite being a junior-level data scientist, she had a knack for identifying “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” Facebook’s term for the fake accounts that have exploited its platforms to undermine global democracy, defraud users, and spread false information. In her memo, which is included in the Facebook Papers but was previously leaked to BuzzFeed News , Zhang details what she found in her nearly three years at Facebook: coordinated disinformation campaigns in dozens of countries, including India, Brazil, Mexico, Afghanistan, South Korea, Bolivia, Spain, and Ukraine. In some cases, such as in Honduras and Azerbaijan, Zhang was able to tie accounts involved in these campaigns directly to ruling political parties. In the memo, posted to Workplace the day Zhang was fired from Facebook for what the company alleged was poor performance, she says that she made decisions about these accounts with minimal oversight or support, despite repeated entreaties to senior leadership. On multiple occasions, she said, she was told to prioritize other work.

Facebook has not disputed Zhang’s factual assertions about her time at the company, though it maintains that controlling abuse of its platform is a top priority. A Facebook spokesperson said that the company tries “to keep people safe even if it impacts our bottom line,” adding that the company has spent $13 billion on safety since 2016. “​​Our track record shows that we crack down on abuse abroad with the same intensity that we apply in the U.S.”

Zhang's memo, though, paints a different picture. “We focus upon harm and priority regions like the United States and Western Europe,” she wrote. But eventually, “it became impossible to read the news and monitor world events without feeling the weight of my own responsibility.” Indeed, Facebook explicitly prioritizes certain countries for intervention by sorting them into tiers, the documents show. Zhang “chose not to prioritize” Bolivia, despite credible evidence of inauthentic activity in the run-up to the country’s 2019 election. That election was marred by claims of fraud, which fueled widespread protests; more than 30 people were killed and more than 800 were injured.

Read: Facebook’s id is showing

“I have blood on my hands,” Zhang wrote in the memo. By the time she left Facebook, she was having trouble sleeping at night. “I consider myself to have been put in an impossible spot—caught between my loyalties to the company and my loyalties to the world as a whole.”

I n February, just over a year after Facebook’s high-profile sweep for Middle Eastern and North African domestic-servant trafficking, an internal report identified a web of similar activity, in which women were being trafficked from the Philippines to the Persian Gulf, where they were locked in their homes, denied pay, starved, and abused. This report found that content “should have been detected” for violating Facebook’s policies but had not been, because the mechanism that would have detected much of it had recently been made inactive. The title of the memo is “Domestic Servitude: This Shouldn’t Happen on FB and How We Can Fix It.”

What happened in the Philippines—and in Honduras, and Azerbaijan, and India, and Bolivia—wasn’t just that a very large company lacked a handle on the content posted to its platform. It was that, in many cases, a very large company knew what was happening and failed to meaningfully intervene.

That Facebook has repeatedly prioritized solving problems for Facebook over solving problems for users should not be surprising. The company is under the constant threat of regulation and bad press. Facebook is doing what companies do, triaging and acting in its own self-interest.

But Facebook is not like other companies. It is bigger, and the stakes of its decisions are higher. In North America, we have recently become acutely aware of the risks and harms of social media. But the Facebook we see is the platform at its best. Any solutions will need to apply not only to the problems we still encounter here, but also to those with which the other 90 percent of Facebook’s users struggle every day.

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Essays on Facebook

Facebook has become an integral part of our daily lives, influencing the way we communicate, socialize, and consume information. As a result, it has also become a popular topic for essays across various disciplines. Whether you're an aspiring journalist, a social media marketer, or a sociology student, choosing the right Facebook essay topic is crucial for a successful paper. In this guide, we'll discuss the importance of the topic, provide advice on choosing a topic, and offer a detailed list of recommended essay topics, divided by category.

Writing an essay about Facebook can provide valuable insights into the impact of social media on society, the psychology of online interactions, and the business strategies of a tech giant. The right topic can help you explore these themes in depth and offer new perspectives on the role of Facebook in our lives. Additionally, choosing a relevant and engaging topic can make your essay stand out and capture the reader's attention from the start.

When choosing a Facebook essay topic, consider your interests and the specific focus of your assignment. Are you writing for a psychology class? A communications course? Or perhaps a business management program? Tailoring your topic to your discipline can help you delve into the subject matter more effectively. Additionally, consider the current trends and controversies surrounding Facebook, as these can inspire thought-provoking essay topics.

30 Facebook Essay Topics for Different Occasions and Interests

Psychology and sociology.

• The impact of Facebook on self-esteem and body image
• Online friendships and social capital on Facebook
• The psychology of online interactions: anonymity and self-disclosure
• The role of Facebook in social movements and activism
• Facebook addiction and its psychological effects
• The influence of Facebook on relationships and communication

Marketing and Business

• Facebook's advertising algorithms and targeting strategies
• The impact of Facebook on consumer behavior and purchasing decisions
• Brand management and reputation on Facebook
• The role of influencers and sponsored content on Facebook
• The ethical implications of data mining and user privacy on Facebook
• Facebook's role in digital marketing and social media campaigns

Media and Journalism

• The influence of Facebook on news consumption and media literacy
• Fact-checking and misinformation on Facebook
• The role of Facebook in shaping public opinion and political discourse
• The impact of Facebook's algorithms on content visibility and news distribution
• The future of journalism in the age of Facebook and social media
• Facebook's role in shaping the public narrative and agenda setting

Law and Ethics

• Regulatory challenges and legal issues surrounding Facebook
• User rights and data protection on Facebook
• The ethical implications of targeted advertising and data collection on Facebook
• The role of Facebook in shaping public discourse and freedom of speech
• Comparative analysis of Facebook's privacy policies and practices
• The intersection of antitrust laws and Facebook's market dominance

Technology and Innovation

• Facebook's impact on technology and digital innovation
• The future of virtual reality and Facebook's involvement
• Facebook's data collection and privacy concerns in the age of AI
• Comparing Facebook's features and evolution with other tech giants
• The role of Facebook in shaping the future of communication and connectivity

With these recommended essay topics, you can explore the multifaceted impact of Facebook on society, business, and culture. Whether you're interested in psychology, marketing, journalism, or ethics, there's a wealth of compelling topics to choose from. By selecting a topic that aligns with your interests and expertise, you can craft a well-researched and insightful essay that contributes to the ongoing discourse surrounding Facebook and its influence on our lives.

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Using Facebook for Qualitative Research: A Brief Primer

Daschel franz.

1 Center to Improve Veteran Involvement in Care, Veterans Affairs Portland Health Care System, Department of Veterans Affairs, Portland, OR, United States

Heather Elizabeth Marsh

2 Department of Psychiatry, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, OR, United States

Jason I Chen

3 School of Public Health, Oregon Health & Science University and Portland State University, Portland, OR, United States

Associated Data

Summary of qualitative peer-reviewed studies using Facebook as a data source.

As Facebook continues to grow its number of active users, the potential to harness data generated by Facebook users also grows. As much of Facebook users’ activity consists of creating (and commenting on) written posts, the potential use of text data for research is enormous. However, conducting a content analysis of text from Facebook users requires adaptation of research methods used for more traditional sources of qualitative data. Furthermore, best practice guidelines to assist researchers interested in conducting qualitative studies using data derived from Facebook are lacking. The purpose of this primer was to identify opportunities, as well as potential pitfalls, of conducting qualitative research with Facebook users and their activity on Facebook and provide potential options to address each of these issues. We begin with an overview of information obtained from a literature review of 23 studies published between 2011 and 2018 and our own research experience to summarize current approaches to conducting qualitative health research using data obtained from Facebook users. We then identify potential strategies to address limitations related to current approaches and propose 5 key considerations for the collection, organization, and analysis of text data from Facebook. Finally, we consider ethical issues around the use and protection of Facebook data obtained from research participants. In this primer, we have identified several key considerations that should aid health researchers in the planning and execution of qualitative studies involving content analysis of text data from Facebook users.

Introduction

Social media platforms provide an information-rich opportunity to reach diverse populations that would otherwise be difficult to identify. Facebook, in particular, is the most dominant player in the social media landscape. Over the past decade, the number of active Facebook users has grown from 145 million in 2008 to more than 1.2 billion in 2018 [ 1 , 2 ]. As of 2018, approximately two-thirds of US adults use Facebook [ 3 ]. In addition, about 75% of Facebook users visit the site at least once per day and spend upward of 50 min daily on Facebook [ 3 , 4 ], where they get entertainment, read news, communicate with friends and family, and exchange social support [ 5 ].

As a significant portion of individuals’ social lives is conducted (and hence displayed and recorded) on Facebook, it is a potentially rich source of qualitative data for researchers [ 6 ]. Numerous studies ranging in topic from psychopathology [ 7 , 8 ] and chronic physical illnesses (eg, cancer or diabetes) [ 9 , 10 ] to substance use [ 11 , 12 ] have incorporated data from Facebook, recruited from and included Facebook users as study participants [ 13 , 14 ], or conducted behavioral interventions on the Facebook platform [ 12 ]. Despite the rising number of studies on Facebook, relatively little is understood about how qualitative data from Facebook users can best be captured and used for health research purposes. Individual and group interviewing, focus groups, individual and group ethnographic interviewing, and observational data are among the most common methods used to traditionally collect qualitative data [ 15 - 17 ]. These sources of qualitative data naturally allow researchers to unpack deep meaning within a select group of people [ 18 ], probe for underlying values, beliefs, and assumptions [ 19 ], and obtain more nuanced or novel information than that derived from other methods such as close-ended survey questions [ 19 ]. However, because of the nature of Facebook data, qualitative research methods may require additional adaptation to best capture the visual, virtual, and textual interactions on social media with accuracy [ 20 ].

In this primer, we explore the opportunities, as well as potential pitfalls, of conducting qualitative research with Facebook users and their activity on Facebook. Our focus here is purposefully narrow. We limit our approach to content analysis and user-generated text related to health topics on Facebook. We begin with an overview of the forms of qualitative data and data analysis best suited to the Facebook environment, focusing on text data generated by Facebook users. Then, we consider gaps in current qualitative methods based on the existing published literature. Finally, we present 5 key issues that must be addressed in a successive manner when conducting qualitative content analyses of health-related topics involving Facebook data, and we offer potential options to address each of these issues.

Overview of Using Qualitative Data on Facebook

Data obtained from Facebook users offer substantial opportunities for qualitative researchers. As described in Table 1 , user-generated videos, images, reactions, and text are a rich source of qualitative data on Facebook. For the purpose of this paper, we focused on user-generated textual data. There are 3 primary types of user-generated textual data on Facebook:

Potential sources of data for qualitative data analysis within Facebook.

• Posts: A post is written by a Facebook user, and that post then appears on another Facebook user’s timeline. A status update is a common type of post in the Facebook environment, which will appear in the news feed of a user’s Facebook friends. A news feed is a list of updates from a user’s Facebook friends that is intended to provide the user a quick update on what their Facebook friends have been doing on Facebook.
• Comments : A comment is a response to a Facebook post or a response to another comment itself.
• Messages: A message is privately sent from one user to another Facebook user, typically a Facebook friend. A message does not appear on a user’s Facebook timeline or in their news feed.

All 3 of these types of user-generated text on Facebook may be accompanied by image(s), video(s), and/or emoticon(s). An emoticon, or emoji , is a graphic facial expression that can appear embedded in text communication on Facebook and is primarily used to provide emotional information that would otherwise only be found in traditional face-to-face interactions (eg, tone of voice) [ 21 ].

Social media qualitative research methods can be described in 3 ways: active analysis, passive analysis, and research self-identification [ 22 ]. Active analysis on Facebook involves the participation of research members in communication with Facebook participants. For instance, Cheung et al [ 11 ] created a study Facebook group and invited participants to join. The research team member serving as the Facebook group moderator actively participated in generating content (ie, posts and comments) that aimed to stimulate engagement with study participants. Passive analysis on Facebook involves the study of information patterns observed on Facebook or the interactions between users in existing Facebook groups. For example, Kent et al [ 13 ] investigated public attitudes about obesity and cancer by performing a keyword search on Facebook to identify relational themes, grammatical elements, and valence of the sentiments contained in Facebook posts and associated comments. Finally, research self-identification is when researchers use Facebook as a research recruitment tool to gather participants for Web-based interviews, focus groups, or surveys. For example, Pedersen et al [ 14 ] designed 3 different sets of study advertisements that appeared on approximately 3.6 million targeted Facebook users’ news feed. By clicking on the study advertisements, Facebook users were redirected to a study survey and were given the option to participate in the study.

To determine current approaches to the use of qualitative data on Facebook, we performed a literature search in April 2018 for papers that used qualitative methods to analyze user-generated Facebook text related to health topics (ie, any acute or chronic disease including substance abuse disorders). Our review identified 23 studies published between 2011 and 2018. The majority of these studies extracted data from public Facebook pages or groups [ 7 - 11 , 13 , 23 - 37 ]. Of 23 studies, 18 used passive analysis [ 7 - 10 , 13 , 23 - 28 , 30 - 36 ], 5 used active analysis [ 11 , 12 , 29 , 37 , 38 ], and none used research self-identification. Among the passive analysis studies, the number of posts, comments, and groups or pages analyzed ranged from 25 to 500, 233 to 15,972, and 1 to 840, respectively. In addition, among the active analysis studies, the number of posts analyzed and participants included ranged from 6 to 469 and 79 to 160 participants, respectively. Nearly all studies used a process of manual coding, although 1 study used machine learning techniques [ 37 ]. A wide range of health issues was examined from breast cancer to smoking cessation. Further descriptive characteristics can be found in Multimedia Appendix 1 .

Gaps in Current Qualitative Approaches

Our review identified a number of limitations within the existing literature. First, most studies did not provide detailed descriptions of their methods [ 39 , 40 ]. In particular, description of data extraction methods was frequently missing [ 7 , 11 , 13 , 23 , 25 , 27 - 31 , 33 , 34 , 37 ]. Furthermore, there are few existing resources that offer guidance for researchers seeking to use Facebook for health-related topics. Lack of methodological descriptions and advice in the literature pose as barriers to researchers trying to replicate study results or apply the same methods in pursuit of novel research questions in the health domain. Second, none of the studies analyzed bidirectional interactions among participants and other Facebook users. Bidirectional interactions are social exchanges of user-generated and received text between Facebook users. Received text is text directed to a Facebook user, such as a friend’s comment to that Facebook user’s post (hereafter, user-directed text). These interactions are commonly displayed as a chain of communication on a user’s timeline or news feed that exemplify how individuals use and interact with others on Facebook. By collecting only user-generated text or user-directed text on Facebook, studies are only capturing one side of Facebook user’s interactions with other Facebook members. However, collecting bidirectional interactions provides more context of social exchanges on Facebook, which can assist in more meaningful interpretations of the data. Therefore, it is important to establish methods for researchers seeking to capture this type of information. Third, most studies that included either manual or machine-coding techniques lacked familiarization methods before coding [ 8 , 11 - 13 , 24 - 27 , 29 - 38 ]. Familiarization methods include researchers immersing themselves with the data before coding by actively reading the data to understand the depth and context of the content [ 41 ]. To conduct rigorous and trustworthy thematic analyses, it is vital to read through the entire dataset at least once before coding [ 41 , 42 ].

Owing to these limitations, in this paper, we identify and discuss 5 key issues in the process of conducting qualitative research using data obtained from Facebook. These issues are summarized in Textbox 1 and described in detail below. In addition, we use our own experience from a recent research project to illustrate 1 potential approach to handle each of these issues. Our experience derives from a study in which we used Facebook advertisements to recruit a sample of military veterans [ 43 ]. Study participants completed a Web-based survey about their psychiatric symptoms and social support, and a subgroup was invited to participate in an additional in-person study visit in which they provided access to some of their Facebook data. For qualitative analysis in this project using Facebook data, we used content analysis, which, for our study, was a more directed approach that allowed us to begin by identifying key concepts and variables as initial coding categories.

Key considerations for future studies using qualitative approaches for social media data.

Step 1. What kind of Facebook user will be included in the study?

• The method of recruitment of Facebook users will affect participants’ characteristics and generalizability of results.
• The degree of activity on Facebook by a study subject will impact the amount of data available for analysis.

Step 2. What Facebook data will be analyzed?

• Facebook contains a combination of public and private information about individual users.
• Filters can be used to select desired variables and data about Facebook users.
• It is helpful to predetermine a period of Facebook use to be included in data analysis.

Step 3. How will the Facebook data be obtained?

• Options include partnering with Facebook, collecting publicly available data, creating a research study–specific Facebook page or group, or downloading participants’ Facebook data.
• Each option has pros and cons related to the complexity of the process and comprehensiveness of data obtained.

Step 4. How will the Facebook data be analyzed?

• Depending on the size of the dataset, researchers may prefer a manual versus more automated approach to coding and data analysis.
• Qualitative data analysis and other software can assist with the data analysis.
• Consider the model of qualitative analysis used in the study.

Step 5. How will participant’s Facebook data be protected?

• The Connected and Open Research Ethics is a Web-based resource [ 44 ] to help navigate ethical issues around social media research.
• Common ethical issues include the following: who will informed consent be obtained from, how will data of research subjects be kept secure, and how will the privacy of research subjects be maintained.

Step 1: What Kind of Facebook User Will Be Included in the Study?

In deciding what kind of Facebook user will be included in the study, it is important to consider how participants will be recruited.

For studies that involve delivery of an intervention through Facebook (ie, active analysis), the platform offers 2 main features that researchers can use to recruit and maintain participants: Facebook pages and Facebook groups. Facebook pages are public, whereas Facebook groups can be public, or private or secret. In public Facebook groups, only invited members can see content. However, in secret Facebook groups, only invited members can see content, and the group is hidden—it cannot be searched for, or found, using the Facebook search engine [ 45 ]. Facebook pages and all Facebook groups can be created to recruit and conduct an intervention. In addition, researchers can access existing public Facebook pages and groups comprising current members to collect data. However, these pages and groups cannot be tailored to a researcher’s interventions. Furthermore, Facebook advertisements can be used to target a specific population by leveraging demographic profiles available on Facebook. Furthermore, Facebook advertisements can use additional information (eg, interests) added by a user to their profile. Some studies recruit both current Facebook users and other participants who are willing to open a Facebook account for the study [ 45 ]. In addition, it is important to consider the degree to which participants are regularly and actively using Facebook. Regular users will tend to have a richer record of their Facebook activity. That said, not all users of Facebook actively engage in behaviors that create a record of interaction on Facebook (eg, posting and commenting) [ 46 ]. Facebook users can be categorized into 2 types of users based on the frequency of engaging in these behaviors: active users and passive users. Active users contribute to Facebook interactions by posting and commenting frequently. Passive users tend to observe Facebook interactions and not actively contribute. For active analysis studies, both active and passive users can be considered for recruitment. Interventionists may consider designing posts to initiate interactions among participants, especially from passive users.

In addition, studies intending to observe Facebook user’s interactions with other users (ie, passive analysis) can use 2 public group features available on Facebook: Facebook pages and public Facebook groups. As these pages and groups are public, researchers are able to openly view all Facebook data without restrictions. As a result, researchers can search for an existing public page or group related to a health topic of interest and then collect the data presented within the page or group. Data found in public Facebook pages and groups can be from both active and passive users. Typically, there is a direct relationship between the number of members part of a Facebook page or group and the amount of data available. One drawback about using public Facebook pages and groups is that the pages and groups about a health topic of interest must already exist. Alternatively, passive analysis studies can recruit Facebook participants individually through Facebook advertisements. An advantage of this approach is the ability to continue an advertising campaign until enough participants and data are collected, whereas a disadvantage of it is the requirement for a nontrivial advertising budget.

Paid advertisements on Facebook are also useful for studies seeking to recruit participants from Facebook to participate in interviews, focus groups, surveys, or other research activities (ie, research self-identification). Facebook advertisements can be used to target particular users using the methods described above. Facebook users can be directed to a study website when they click on the advertisement, which then can further describe the study and include Web-based informed consent. Furthermore, Facebook advertisements can record user actions such as advertisement clicks (ie, number of times the advertisement was clicked on) and comments on the post containing the advertisement.

Finally, as with other Web-based studies in which in-person contact with a study participant does not occur, exclusion criteria should be carefully considered to reduce misrepresentation of participants and potentially counterfeit responders (ie, responders pretending to fit a certain demographic for study compensation).

An Applied Example

We used research self-identification methods to recruit participants through Facebook advertisements [ 43 ]. Advertisements contained a call to action to participate in a health research study. Study advertisements broadly targeted Facebook users in the United States of any age or gender who had interests relevant to military veterans. Advertisements were hosted by Facebook pages affiliated with our university. This allowed us to draw on the established base of Facebook users interested in and following our university on Facebook.

To reduce misrepresentation of participants, we excluded individuals who completed the survey in less than 5 min, had a duplicate or multiple survey responses, or incorrectly answered military-related insider knowledge questions [ 14 , 47 ]. To help ensure study subjects had enough Facebook data to analyze, we chose to collect qualitative data from participants who reported using Facebook at least once a day.

Step 2: What Facebook Data Will Be Analyzed?

In deciding what Facebook data will be analyzed, it is critical to determine the setting in which the data will be collected. For active or passive analysis studies collecting data from public, private, or secret Facebook groups or pages, it is important to consider downloading individual Facebook user’s profile information in addition to the information exchanged in groups or pages. A Facebook user’s profile information shows how the user interacts in multiple Facebook settings compared with a singular setting (ie, a Facebook page or group). Therefore, collecting and analyzing data from a user’s Facebook profile provides more context to how they interact, whom they interact with, and in which environments (ie, public or private) they are more active. Understanding how research participants interact on Facebook can be used to supplement the context of the responses and inform future intervention processes.

In addition, given how expansive the amount of Facebook data can be, even just from a single Facebook user, it is vital to determine the scope of data that will be analyzed. As described in Table 1 , Facebook features, such as Filters , allow data to be viewed in already separated Facebook variables such as user-generated data (ie, notes, posts tagged in, and timeline review). These filters can be manipulated to display specific data of interest. Although filters can help find user-generated and user-directed data, it is important to also capture these same data in the timeline. The timeline shows how Facebook users are interacting, which helps provide context when analyzing the data.

Furthermore, it is also important to determine how long it takes to collect the Facebook data. Data collection time is dependent on how active the Facebook user is and, for pages or groups, how many users are part of a page or group. These factors can impact additional study procedures (eg, interviews) at the time of the Facebook data collection period.

Our Experience and Applied Example

In our study, we sought to capture all our veteran participants’ written social interactions on Facebook. We did this by collecting user-generated and user-directed comments, status updates, and posts from the activity log and the timeline. The timeline was also included as it contains data from both public and private settings on Facebook. By collecting both user-generated and user-directed data, we were able to capture bidirectional interactions between study participants and other Facebook users within their social network.

In addition, data were collected over a 4-week period around the time of the participants’ survey completion. We decided to collect participant’s Facebook data at the time of the in-person interview so that a research member could be physically present to assist a participant in the process of downloading his or her Facebook activity. After informed consent, the initial 10 min of the session were used to collect the participant’s Facebook activity information, which was sufficient to collect users’ Facebook data, ranging up to approximately 70 user-generated posts.

Step 3: How Will the Facebook Data Be Obtained?

Option 1: partner with facebook.

Facebook data can be obtained through a research partnership with Facebook. Kramer et al [ 48 ], supported by Facebook resources, collected posts and manipulated news feeds of 689,003 Facebook users over a 20-year period. Burke and Kraut [ 49 ], led by a Facebook researcher, collected user-directed comments, private messages, timeline posts, likes, and pokes, as well as user information such as number of profiles viewed, news feed stories clicked on, and photos viewed from 10,557 Facebook users. Some advantages of partnering with Facebook are that studies can have access to massive amounts of data including Facebook variables that are not shared with users or third parties [ 50 ]. In addition, one can leverage Facebook resources (ie, data processing systems) to track how much people are discussing specific topics of interest and the subsequent opinions of those topics expressed in everyday conversation. Such Facebook resources efficiently gather large-scale data in which data are retrieved almost instantaneously. However, a challenge of partnering with Facebook is meeting their collaborative requirements , such as finding a Facebook sponsor to lead the research effort, and the faculty principal investigator’s institution paying up to 40% of overhead costs for a hosted researcher [ 51 ]. Therefore, this process can be resource intensive in terms of both time and financial investment by the partner researcher.

Option 2: Publicly Available Data

Active and passive analysis studies can obtain Facebook data through public Facebook pages and groups. There are several studies using extraction methods such as manual extraction (eg, copying and pasting data into a spreadsheet) or contracting through external models and third-party services for manual extraction. Abramson et al [ 9 ] copied and pasted each public timeline post from the Breast Cancer Organization page into a spreadsheet with the corresponding responses. Eghdam et al [ 8 ] used Netvizz version 1.25, a data collection software created by Facebook, to collect anonymous data from public Facebook groups. Kent et al [ 13 ] used a Web-crawling service that mined publicly available posts and comments from Facebook using keywords related to obesity. Furthermore, Kosinski et al [ 50 ] provide Pennebaker’s Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), and the Apply Magic Sauce, a website developed by the University of Cambridge psychometrics center, [ 52 ] as an additional resource for data collection. An advantage of using public data is that there are a lot of data for a range of health topics, and informed consent by the participant is not required. However, the challenge of using data shared publicly could be biased because of social desirability influences and other censoring by a given participant. Studies suggest that both privacy concerns and the user’s audience can impact self-disclosure on Facebook, especially when it comes to sharing health information [ 53 - 57 ]. Eysenbach and Till [ 22 ] recommend working with group moderators to develop an adequate plan for informing group members of the use of their data. Although they identify obtaining permission from the group moderator as insufficient on its own, group moderators have greater knowledge of their group members and may be able to provide important information on how to best obtain consent for use of data.

Option 3: Create and Monitor a Facebook Page or Group

In addition, for active analysis studies, Facebook data can be obtained by creating and monitoring a Facebook page or group. Beullens and Schepers [ 12 ] collected 2575 pictures and 92 status updates by creating a study Facebook profile and sending friend requests, including a study overview message, to 166 college students. Tower et al [ 38 ] collected post information by creating a Facebook group and inviting 198 nursing students to join the group through email. The invitation advised the group to post information related to their study. A faculty member initiated discussion in the Facebook group. The text and associated attributes were downloaded onto a spreadsheet. An advantage of creating and monitoring a Facebook page or group is that it allows a research team to customize a group specific to a particular health topic. Subsequently, targeted individuals can be invited to this page or group and be presented a set of specific questions/instructions to stimulate participant engagement. In addition, only group settings can be made private, which can create a more secure environment for participants to disclose personal information. However, a disadvantage of private groups is that there is a permanent setting that organizes user-directed posts such that the most recent interactions appear at the top of the group feed versus a chronological ordering of the post [ 45 ]. As a result, posts containing important content may be pushed to the bottom of the group feed because of frequent posting in the groups, thereby making it difficult for participants to find information posted by the groups interventionists [ 45 ]. In addition, although Facebook groups can be private or secret, they are still not the Facebook user’s natural environment —that is, the social network comprising Facebook friends the user normally interacts with. Therefore, Facebook users recruited into an intervention conducted in a private or secret group may behave differently in groups created by researchers, especially when they know they are being observed by researchers [ 58 ].

Option 4: Private Messages

Furthermore, for active analysis studies, Facebook data can be obtained by asking participants to copy and paste user-generated Facebook text (eg, text from timeline posts or private messages) and provide it to a research team member through a Web-based portal or through private messaging to a Facebook account created by the research team. Bazarova et al [ 37 ] collected 474 most recent status updates, timeline posts, and private messages by inviting 79 participants to copy and paste their data into a Web survey. An advantage of having users provide their Facebook data through the private messaging feature or a Web-based portal is that it creates a secure environment in which participants’ Facebook data can be kept confidential from other Facebook users or study participants. However, one disadvantage of this particular method is that researchers would neither be able to observe passive interactions among a particular group of Facebook users nor observe interactions as a result of a proposed set of questions/instructions regarding health-related topics.

A fourth option, applicable to active and passive analyses and some research self-identification studies, is directly downloading participants’ Facebook data during an in-person study visit. We chose this option because it was the only one that allowed us to download individual’s Facebook profiles without establishing a partnership with Facebook. For instance, in our own study, we obtained Facebook data by downloading participants’ Facebook activity information. During the in-person interview, users’ Facebook activity log and timeline data were collected separately by study staff using the following steps: (1) ask participants to login to their Facebook account, (2) follow the steps described in Figure 1 , (3) scroll backward on the selected page chronologically until 1-month period before the date of the survey; (4) save as an HTML file on OHSU Box (a cloud-based data storage service that complies with local security and regulatory policies), (5) open saved file with Safari to view extracted data, (6) log participants out, and (7) ensure that no username or password information was retained by making sure user login information was not saved by the browser. We noted some advantages of downloading participants’ Facebook profile information, such as a participants’ Facebook profile can provide insight to how individuals interact, who they interact with, and what environment (ie, public and private) they are more active in. This helped us understand how study participants interacted on Facebook. However, a challenge of downloading participants’ Facebook profile information is that it requires participant consent, and it can be more difficult to collect massive quantities of private data because of the length of the collection period.

Steps to access the timeline (eg, blue square) and activity log (eg, red squares) on Facebook.

Step 4: How Will the Facebook Data Be Analyzed?

Qualitative Facebook data are commonly analyzed using methods such as content analysis to assess a wide range of qualitative data or else constant comparison to identify themes [ 6 ]. In deciding how qualitative Facebook data will be analyzed, it is important to consider the quantity of the data as well as the qualitative approach being used. For active and passive analysis studies using larger datasets, it is preferable to analyze data using software programs. AlQarni et al [ 34 ] analyzed 1551 posts using predetermined themes, and further inductive codes were used to independently extract and analyze the Facebook posts to determine major content themes. Thematic analysis was performed using NVivo, a qualitative software used to code, store, and potentially exchange data with SPSS for further statistical analysis. Kramer et al [ 48 ] used LIWC (2007) software to analyze 689,003 posts to determine if the valence of the posts was positive or negative. Keller et al [ 32 ] used ATLAS.ti, a qualitative software used to code data, to code 1614 comments for major and minor themes. It is important to note that ATLAS.ti can be used to code HTML files of individual’s Facebook downloads; however, this has not been done in social media qualitative research studies [ 59 ]. Instead, ATLAS.ti has been traditionally used to code Microsoft Word documents of transcribed interviews.

As our study contained a relatively small dataset (23 subjects with 201 posts and 424 comments), we opted to analyze data manually. User-generated text from status updates, posts, and comments and user-directed text from posts and comments from the HTML files were copied and pasted into an Excel spreadsheet and analyzed for markers of social support. Our codebook contained 3 different types of social support that have previously been described in the literature (emotional, instrumental, and informational) and a fourth category for other evidence of social support (eg, “Wow, that’s a great joke”). In addition, we coded the valence of user-directed social support as positive, negative, or neutral. Before coding, each coder read over the entire dataset to familiarize themselves with the content of the data. The familiarization process helped lead to more meaningful interpretations of the data because we were able to easily provide context to each piece of text we coded. As is common in qualitative research, after an initial training period, 2 coders independently coded participants’ data. Furthermore, each coder created a memo describing their experiences during the coding process. This highlighted the challenges and successes of the coding process, which guided conversations around any discrepancies. In addition, the memo process brought awareness to potential challenges of coding text on social media, which can be addressed early on for future social media qualitative work. Furthermore, the memo process also identified general themes that were prevalent in the data.

Step 5: How Will Participants’ Facebook Data Be Protected?

It is important to highlight that Facebook research raises several ethical questions. Owing to the nature of studying Facebook communities, researchers can potentially violate the privacy rights of Facebook users. Facebook users that are members of public Facebook pages or groups do not expect to become research subjects nor do the Facebook friends of study participants (ie, nonparticipants ). The boundary between private and public Facebook data may sometimes be unclear. The majority of Facebook users are aware that their data may not be private [ 22 ], especially in a public setting on Facebook. However, the literature regarding social media users’ comprehension of privacy literacy is limited [ 60 ]. As a result, researchers should ensure that informed consent language is clear regarding how a participant’s Web-based data will be used. Pilot testing of informed consent language may help ensure that the information presented is easily comprehensible for a broad range of populations. Regardless, it is important to maintain the safety and anonymity of individuals’ Facebook information whether or not they are a research participant.

In addition, it is important to note the potential ethical dilemmas associated with establishing a research partnership with Facebook. Facebook is a powerful company with a rich source of data; however, Facebook has received public scrutiny because of their misuse of their users’ Facebook data. Therefore, the responsibly is placed on the research teams to ensure that Facebook users’ data are obtained ethically and protected. Arigo et al [ 61 ] recommend including research team members who are well versed with Facebook’s cooperate terms and conditions and privacy policies. It is strongly encouraged that research teams are knowledgeable of the peculiarities of Facebook before establishing a partnership to assist in the development of research methodological procedures regarding data collection and privacy.

As each institutional review board (IRB) will vary in its familiarity with social media research, we recommend closely consulting with professional and independent organizations (eg, Association of Internet Researchers Ethics Working Group Guidelines, The National Committee for Research Ethics, and The Humanities Research Ethics Guidelines for Internet Research) as well as Web-based resources such as the Connected and Open Research Ethics (CORE). CORE can provide assistance in how to address potential ethical issues for researchers and IRBs interested in social media research. Common ethical questions that have been raised on CORE include the following: (1) Who will informed consent be obtained from–is informed consent required for nonparticipants on a research subject’s account?; (2) How will data from research subjects be kept secure on the social media platform?; and (3) How will the privacy of research subjects be maintained? CORE has created a collaborative platform where researchers can exchange expertise and questions pertaining to social media research. Features such as the Resource Library , Q&A Forum , and the CORE Network provide scientists access to IRB-approved research protocols and consent forms and allow researchers to discuss collaboratively ethical design or potential social media strategies [ 44 ].

In our study, participants interested in an optional, in-person interview provided contact information with which study staff used to arrange the study visit. For individuals who were unable to come in-person, we conducted interviews through phone but did not download their Facebook data. Overall, 2 separate informed consents were obtained, once online for those completing the survey and again in-person for those sharing their Facebook data. During the informed process for those sharing their Facebook data, participants were informed that their timeline and activity log would be collected to observe their online social interactions and Facebook usage. In addition, participants were informed that their Facebook data would be labeled with a unique code to protect their identity. All study procedures were approved by the IRB of Oregon Health & Science University.

Limitations

There are several limitations to this study. First, this study represents 1 proposed framework. Additional validation of this framework among other experts would be a helpful next step. Second, the scope of the study is limited. We primarily focused on content analysis of user-generated Facebook text related to health topics using a content analysis approach to qualitative analysis. Studies that intend to use other models of qualitative analysis may require somewhat different approaches to the use of data from Facebook. Nontext qualitative data from Facebook (eg, images, videos, and emoticons) also bear further examination. Third, because our key considerations are primarily directed toward health-related studies, it is unclear whether they are generalizable to other research topics that harness data from Facebook. Finally, our applied example did not address methods for collecting data from existing closed Facebook groups, although studies that did do so were identified in our literature review. Studies that involve interaction with Facebook group members require additional consideration, and future research could help elucidate this area by extending the work presented by Eysenbach and Till [ 22 ].

Conclusions

Although there are an increasing number of studies that are using qualitative data obtained from Facebook users, there has been little published to date, summarizing the current state of this research. Our review of the literature and own experience conducting this type of research have led us to identify several key considerations for health researchers interested in conducting qualitative studies involving Facebook data. Our hope is that future research continues to refine and develop approaches to conducting research in this exciting area.

Acknowledgments

This project was supported, in part, by a Career Development Award to ART from the Veterans Health Administration Health Service Research and Development (CDA 14-428) and the HSR&D Center to Improve Veteran Involvement in Care. This project was also supported by awards received by ART from the Collins Medical Trust Research Grant and the Medical Research Foundation of Oregon New Investigator Grant (1603). The US Department of Veterans Affairs, Collins Medical Trust Research Grant, and the Medical Research Foundation of Oregon New Investigator Grant had no role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of the data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; or decision to submit the manuscript for publication. The findings and conclusions in this document are those of the authors who are responsible for its contents; the findings and conclusions do not necessarily represent the views of the US Department of Veterans Affairs or the US government, the Collins Medical Trust Research Grant nor the Medical Research Foundation of Oregon New Investigator Grant.

Abbreviations

Multimedia appendix 1.

Conflicts of Interest: None declared.

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The Facebook Papers: What you need to know about the trove of insider documents

Bill Chappell

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies on Capitol Hill in April 2018. A trove of insider documents known as the Facebook Papers has the company facing backlash over its effects on society and politics. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images hide caption

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies on Capitol Hill in April 2018. A trove of insider documents known as the Facebook Papers has the company facing backlash over its effects on society and politics.

Facebook's rank-and-file employees warned their leaders about the company's effects on society and politics in the United States. And they say its inability to effectively moderate content has magnified those dangers, both in the U.S. and abroad. Those are two of the main takeaways from thousands of internal Facebook documents that NPR and other news outlets have reviewed.

The documents, known collectively as the Facebook Papers, were shared in redacted form with Congress after whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, disclosed them to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Haugen alleges that the trove of statements and data prove that Facebook's leaders have repeatedly and knowingly put the company's image and profitability ahead of the public good — even at the risk of violence and other harm.

Here are 4 key points from the Facebook whistleblower's testimony on Capitol Hill

Some of the internal documents initially emerged last month in The Wall Street Journal . They include internal research findings and internal audits that the company performed on its own practices.

Here are four main takeaways from news outlets' review of the documents:

Facebook employees hotly debated its policies, especially after Jan. 6

When then-President Donald Trump's supporters mounted an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, Facebook rushed to take technical measures that aimed to clamp down on misinformation and content that might incite further violence. The next day, it banned Trump from the platform — at first temporarily, but then permanently.

In the weeks leading up to the violence, Facebook worked to defuse vitriol and conspiracy theories from Trump voters who refused to accept his defeat. As NPR's Shannon Bond and Bobby Allyn have reported , the company repeatedly shut down groups affiliated with the Stop the Steal movement. But those groups were attracting hundreds of thousands of users, and Facebook was unable to keep pace as the conspiracy theorists regrouped.

The post-election turmoil put a quick end to the relief that many at Facebook felt on Nov. 3, when the U.S. election played out mostly peacefully and without inklings of foreign meddling.

But then came Jan. 6 — and as the assault on the Capitol riveted and horrified audiences in the U.S. and elsewhere, Facebook employees aired their frustration and anger.

Untangling Disinformation

How the 'stop the steal' movement outwitted facebook ahead of the jan. 6 insurrection.

"We've been fueling this fire for a long time and we shouldn't be surprised it's now out of control," one employee wrote on an internal message board, the documents show.

"Hang in there everyone," Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's chief technology officer, wrote on a message board, calling for calm as he explained the company's approach to the riot, according to the documents.

In response to Schroepfer's message, Facebook employees said it was too little too late.

"I came here hoping to effect change and improve society, but all I've seen is atrophy and abdication of responsibility," one commenter said, according to the documents.

In a statement to NPR, Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said Facebook did not bear responsibility for the Capitol siege.

"The responsibility for the violence that occurred on January 6 lies with those who attacked our Capitol and those who encouraged them," Stone said.

Content standards were contorted, often out of fear of riling high-profile accounts

One of the earliest revelations from the internal documents is the detail they provide about Facebook's separate set of content standards for high-profile accounts , such as those for Trump, or for celebrities.

During Trump's presidency, he regularly made false and inflammatory statements about a wide range of matters. But only a small handful were removed by Facebook, as when the then-president made dangerous claims like saying COVID-19 was less dangerous than the flu or stating that children were " almost immune from this disease."

Facebook has previously defended its approach to such controversial and misleading statements, saying politicians like Trump should be allowed to say what they believe so the public knows what they think. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also repeatedly insisted that Facebook is merely a platform, not the "arbiter of truth."

Oversight Board slams Facebook for giving special treatment to high-profile users

But the documents suggest Facebook's policy of treating influential people differently — codified in a VIP system called XCheck — was created in large part to prevent a public relations backlash from celebrities and other high-profile users.

The entire premise of the XCheck system, the Journal 's Jeff Horwitz told NPR in September , "is to never publicly tangle with anyone who is influential enough to do you harm."

Facebook's own Oversight Board sharply criticized the program last week , saying the company has not been forthcoming enough about its varying standards for content moderation.

A Facebook spokesperson told NPR in a statement that the company asked the board to review the program because it aims "to be clearer in our explanations to them going forward."

Young people see Facebook content as "boring, misleading, and negative"

For much of the past decade, senior citizens have been the fastest-growing U.S. demographic on Facebook — a dramatic turnabout for a company whose founding mystique rests on the image of a hoodie-wearing coder creating a space for college kids to connect on.

During the same timespan, Facebook has seen younger people become less likely to join the site . It's a worrying trend for the company — Facebook insiders got an update on that trend this year, in an internal presentation that is reflected in the documents.

"Most young adults perceive Facebook as a place for people in their 40s and 50s," the company's researchers said, according to The Verge . "Young adults perceive content as boring, misleading, and negative. They often have to get past irrelevant content to get to what matters."

Ex-Facebook employee says company has known about disinformation problem for years

Along with that stumbling block, young users were found to have negative views of Facebook due to privacy concerns and its potential "impact to their wellbeing," The Verge reports.

Haugen previously leaked a Facebook study that found that 13.5% of British teen girls in a survey said their suicidal thoughts became more frequent after they joined Instagram.

In addition to its namesake platform, Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp.

"It is clear that Facebook prioritizes profit over the well-being of children and all users," Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., said during a Senate hearing this month in which Haugen testified.

Facebook's global reach exceeds its grasp

While much of the focus on Facebook in the U.S. has to do with its role in enabling and intensifying political divisions, the documents also fault the company for its activities in numerous other countries.

The documents portray Facebook as failing to deal with a number of social and language complexities stemming from its more than 2.8 billion users worldwide. The results have been especially dangerous and harmful in countries where unrest or rights abuses are common, the documents state.

"Two years ago, Apple threatened to pull Facebook and Instagram from its app store over concerns about the platform being used as a tool to trade and sell maids in the Mideast," The Associated Press reports .

The company routinely struggles with posts and comments in Arabic, both on its main platform and on Instagram, according to the documents. Arabic is one of the world's most widely spoken languages, but its many dialects are highly distinct from each another.

Facebook "doesn't have anyone who can speak most of them or can understand most of them in terms of sort of the vernacular," Horwitz told NPR. "And it also doesn't have a system to route content in those dialects to the right people."

The problem extends beyond Arabic and has a wide range of effects.

"In countries like Afghanistan and Myanmar, these loopholes have allowed inflammatory language to flourish on the platform," the AP reports , "while in Syria and the Palestinian territories, Facebook suppresses ordinary speech, imposing blanket bans on common words."

As similar stories emerged over the weekend about India and Ethiopia, Facebook said that it has more than 40,000 people "working on safety and security, including global content review teams in over 20 sites around the world reviewing content in over 70 languages."

Editor's note: Facebook is among NPR's recent financial supporters.

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What You Don’t Know About How Facebook Uses Your Data

By Natasha Singer

• April 11, 2018

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, went to Capitol Hill this week to explain to members of Congress how the detailed personal information of up to 87 million Facebook users ended up in the hands of a voter-profiling company called Cambridge Analytica.

What Mr. Zuckerberg got instead, as he testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday, was a grilling about Facebook’s own data-mining practices .

Representative Debbie Dingell, a Democrat from Michigan, for one, wanted to know about Facebook’s use of different types of tracking software to follow consumers’ activities on millions of non-Facebook sites all over the web.

“It doesn’t matter whether you have a Facebook account,” Ms. Dingell said to Mr. Zuckerberg . “Through those tools, Facebook is able to collect information from all of us.”

Facebook meticulously scrutinizes the minutiae of its users’ online lives, and its tracking stretches far beyond the company’s well-known targeted advertisements. Details that people often readily volunteer — age, employer, relationship status, likes and location — are just the start.

Facebook tracks both its users and nonusers on other sites and apps. It collects biometric facial data without users’ explicit “opt-in” consent.

And the sifting of users can get quite personal. Among many possible target audiences, Facebook offers advertisers 1.5 million people “whose activity on Facebook suggests that they’re more likely to engage with/distribute liberal political content” and nearly seven million Facebook users who “prefer high-value goods in Mexico.”

“Facebook can learn almost anything about you by using artificial intelligence to analyze your behavior,” said Peter Eckersley, the chief computer scientist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit. “That knowledge turns out to be perfect both for advertising and propaganda. Will Facebook ever prevent itself from learning people’s political views, or other sensitive facts about them?”

Many other companies, including news organizations like The New York Times, mine information about users for marketing purposes. If Facebook is being singled out for such practices, it is because it is a market leader and its stockpiling of personal data is at the core of its $40.6 billion annual business.

Facebook uses a number of software tools to do this tracking. When internet users venture to other sites, Facebook can still monitor what they are doing with software like its ubiquitous “Like” and “Share” buttons, and something called Facebook Pixel — invisible code that’s dropped onto the other websites that allows that site and Facebook to track users’ activity.

Ms. Dingell asked Mr. Zuckerberg how many non-Facebook sites used various kinds of Facebook tracking software: “Is the number over 100 million?” He said he’d have to get back to her with an answer.

“There are common parts of people’s experience on the internet,” Matt Steinfeld, a Facebook spokesman, said in a statement. “But of course we can do more to help people understand how Facebook works and the choices they have.”

While a series of actions by European judges and regulators are trying to curb some of the powerful targeting mechanisms that Facebook employs, federal officials in the United States have done little to constrain them — to the consternation of American privacy advocates who say Facebook continues to test the boundaries of what is permissible.

Facebook requires outside sites that use its tracking technologies to clearly notify users, and it allows Facebook users to opt out of seeing ads based on their use of those apps and websites.

That has not stopped angry users from airing their grievances over Facebook’s practices.

In 2016, for example, a Missouri man with metastatic cancer sued Facebook . The suit, which sought class-action status, accused the tech giant of violating the man’s privacy by tracking his activities on cancer center websites outside the social network — and collecting details about his possible treatment options — without his permission.

Facebook persuaded a federal judge to dismiss the case. The company argued that tracking users for ad-targeting purposes was a standard business practice, and one that its users agreed to when signing up for the service. The Missouri man and two other plaintiffs have appealed the judge’s decision.

Facebook is quick to note that when users sign up for an account, they must agree to the company’s data policy . It plainly states that its data collection “includes information about the websites and apps you visit, your use of our services on those websites and apps, as well as information the developer or publisher of the app or website provides to you or us.”

But in Europe, some regulators contend that Facebook has not obtained users’ explicit and informed consent to track them on other sites and apps. Their general concern, they said, is that many of Facebook’s 2.1 billion users have no idea how much data Facebook could collect about them and how the company could use it. And there is a growing unease that tech giants are unfairly manipulating users.

“Facebook provides a network where the users, while getting free services most of them consider useful, are subject to a multitude of nontransparent analyses, profiling, and other mostly obscure algorithmical processing,” said Johannes Caspar, the data protection commissioner for Hamburg, Germany.

In 2015, for instance, the Belgian Privacy Commission ordered Facebook to stop systematically using “long-term and uniquely identifying” codes to track nonusers without their “unequivocal and specific consent.” The agency subsequently sued Facebook. In February, a judge in Brussels ordered Facebook to stop tracking “each internet user on Belgian soil” on other websites.

Facebook has appealed the decision. In his comments in the House hearing on Wednesday, Mr. Zuckerberg said Facebook tracked nonusers for security purposes — to ensure they could not scrape public data about Facebook users.

But, in one presentation on the case, Belgian regulators wrote: “Tracking nonusers for security purposes is excessive.”

And on Friday, the Italian Competition Authority said it was investigating Facebook for exercising “undue influence” by requiring users to let the company automatically collect all kinds of data about them both on its platform and off.

“Every single action, every single relationship is carefully monitored,” said Giovanni Buttarelli, the European data protection supervisor , who oversees an independent European Union authority that advises on privacy-related laws and policies. “People are being treated like laboratory animals.”

Regulators have won some victories. In 2012, Facebook agreed to stop using face recognition technology in the European Union after Mr. Caspar, the Hamburg data protection commissioner, accused it of violating German and European privacy regulations by collecting users’ biometric facial data without their explicit consent.

Outside the European Union, Facebook employs face recognition technology for a name-tagging feature that can automatically suggest names for the people in users’ photos. But civil liberties experts warn that face recognition technology could threaten the ability of Americans to remain anonymous online, on the street and at political protests.

Now a dozen consumer and privacy groups in the United States have accused Facebook of deceptively rolling out expanded uses of the technology without clearly explaining it to users or obtaining their explicit “opt-in” consent. On Friday, the groups filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission saying that the expansion violated a 2011 agreement prohibiting Facebook from deceptive privacy practices.

Facebook sent notices alerting users of its new face recognition uses and said it provides a page where they can turn the feature off.

Facebook has other powerful techniques with implications users may not fully understand.

One is a marketing service called “Lookalike Audiences,” which goes beyond the familiar Facebook programs allowing advertisers to target people by their ages or likes. The look-alike audience feature allows marketers to examine their existing customers or voters for certain propensities — like big spending — and have Facebook find other users with similar tendencies.

Murka, a social casino game developer, used the feature to target “high-value players” who were “most likely to make in-app purchases,” according to Facebook marketing material .

Some marketers worry that political campaigns or unscrupulous companies could potentially use the same technique to identify the characteristics of, for instance, people who make rash decisions and find a bigger pool of the same sort of Facebook users.

Facebook’s policies prohibit potentially predatory ad-targeting practices. Advertisers are able to target users using the look-alike service, but they do not receive personal data about those Facebook users.

Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit group in Washington, however, warned that this look-alike marketing was a hidden, manipulative practice — on a par with subliminal advertising — and said it should be prohibited.

Follow Natasha Singer on Twitter: @natashanyt

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Social media use in 2021, a majority of americans say they use youtube and facebook, while use of instagram, snapchat and tiktok is especially common among adults under 30..

To better understand Americans’ use of social media, online platforms and messaging apps, Pew Research Center surveyed 1,502 U.S. adults from Jan. 25 to Feb. 8, 2021, by cellphone and landline phone. The survey was conducted by interviewers under the direction of Abt Associates and is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, education and other categories. Here are the  questions used for this report , along with responses, and  its methodology .

Despite a string of controversies and the public’s relatively negative sentiments about aspects of social media, roughly seven-in-ten Americans say they ever use any kind of social media site – a share that has remained relatively stable over the past five years, according to a new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults.

Beyond the general question of overall social media use, the survey also covers use of individual sites and apps. YouTube and Facebook continue to dominate the online landscape, with 81% and 69%, respectively, reporting ever using these sites. And YouTube and Reddit were the only two platforms measured that saw statistically significant growth since 2019 , when the Center last polled on this topic via a phone survey.

When it comes to the other platforms in the survey, 40% of adults say they ever use Instagram and about three-in-ten report using Pinterest or LinkedIn. One-quarter say they use Snapchat, and similar shares report being users of Twitter or WhatsApp. TikTok – an app for sharing short videos – is used by 21% of Americans, while 13% say they use the neighborhood-focused platform Nextdoor.

Even as other platforms do not nearly match the overall reach of YouTube or Facebook, there are certain sites or apps, most notably Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok, that have an especially strong following among young adults. In fact, a majority of 18- to 29-year-olds say they use Instagram (71%) or Snapchat (65%), while roughly half say the same for TikTok.

These findings come from a nationally representative survey of 1,502 U.S. adults conducted via telephone Jan. 25-Feb.8, 2021.

With the exception of YouTube and Reddit, most platforms show little growth since 2019

YouTube is the most commonly used online platform asked about in this survey, and there’s evidence that its reach is growing. Fully 81% of Americans say they ever use the video-sharing site, up from 73% in 2019. Reddit was the only other platform polled about that experienced statistically significant growth during this time period – increasing from 11% in 2019 to 18% today. 

Facebook’s growth has leveled off over the last five years, but it remains one of the most widely used social media sites among adults in the United States: 69% of adults today say they ever use the site, equaling the share who said this two years prior.  

Similarly, the respective shares of Americans who report using Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Twitter and WhatsApp are statistically unchanged since 2019 . This represents a broader trend that extends beyond the past two years in which the rapid adoption of most of these sites and apps seen in the last decade has slowed. (This was the first year the Center asked about TikTok via a phone poll and the first time it has surveyed about Nextdoor.)

Adults under 30 stand out for their use of Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok

When asked about their social media use more broadly – rather than their use of specific platforms – 72% of Americans say they ever use social media sites.

In a pattern consistent with past Center studies on social media use, there are some stark age differences. Some 84% of adults ages 18 to 29 say they ever use any social media sites, which is similar to the share of those ages 30 to 49 who say this (81%). By comparison, a somewhat smaller share of those ages 50 to 64 (73%) say they use social media sites, while fewer than half of those 65 and older (45%) report doing this.

These age differences generally extend to use of specific platforms, with younger Americans being more likely than their older counterparts to use these sites – though the gaps between younger and older Americans vary across platforms.

Majorities of 18- to 29-year-olds say they use Instagram or Snapchat and about half say they use TikTok, with those on the younger end of this cohort – ages 18 to 24 – being especially likely to report using Instagram (76%), Snapchat (75%) or TikTok (55%). 1 These shares stand in stark contrast to those in older age groups. For instance, while 65% of adults ages 18 to 29 say they use Snapchat, just 2% of those 65 and older report using the app – a difference of 63 percentage points.

Additionally, a vast majority of adults under the age of 65 say they use YouTube. Fully 95% of those 18 to 29 say they use the platform, along with 91% of those 30 to 49 and 83% of adults 50 to 64. However, this share drops substantially – to 49% – among those 65 and older.

By comparison, age gaps between the youngest and oldest Americans are narrower for Facebook. Fully 70% of those ages 18 to 29 say they use the platform, and those shares are statistically the same for those ages 30 to 49 (77%) or ages 50 to 64 (73%). Half of those 65 and older say they use the site – making Facebook and YouTube the two most used platforms among this older population.

Other sites and apps stand out for their demographic differences:

• Instagram: About half of Hispanic (52%) and Black Americans (49%) say they use the platform, compared with smaller shares of White Americans (35%) who say the same. 2
• WhatsApp: Hispanic Americans (46%) are far more likely to say they use WhatsApp than Black (23%) or White Americans (16%). Hispanics also stood out for their WhatsApp use in the Center’s previous surveys on this topic.
• LinkedIn: Those with higher levels of education are again more likely than those with lower levels of educational attainment to report being LinkedIn users. Roughly half of adults who have a bachelor’s or advanced degree (51%) say they use LinkedIn, compared with smaller shares of those with some college experience (28%) and those with a high school diploma or less (10%).
• Pinterest: Women continue to be far more likely than men to say they use Pinterest when compared with male counterparts, by a difference of 30 points (46% vs. 16%).
• Nextdoor: There are large differences in use of this platform by community type. Adults living in urban (17%) or suburban (14%) areas are more likely to say they use Nextdoor. Just 2% of rural Americans report using the site.

A majority of Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram users say they visit these platforms on a daily basis

While there has been much written about Americans’ changing relationship with Facebook , its users remain quite active on the platform. Seven-in-ten Facebook users say they use the site daily, including 49% who say they use the site several times a day. (These figures are statistically unchanged from those reported in the Center’s 2019 survey about social media use.)  

Smaller shares – though still a majority – of Snapchat or Instagram users report visiting these respective platforms daily (59% for both). And being active on these sites is especially common for younger users. For instance, 71% of Snapchat users ages 18 to 29 say they use the app daily, including six-in-ten who say they do this multiple times a day. The pattern is similar for Instagram: 73% of 18- to 29-year-old Instagram users say they visit the site every day, with roughly half (53%) reporting they do so several times per day.

YouTube is used daily by 54% if its users, with 36% saying they visit the site several times a day. By comparison, Twitter is used less frequently, with fewer than half of its users (46%) saying they visit the site daily.

• Due to a limited sample size, figures for those ages 25 to 29 cannot be reported on separately. ↩
• There were not enough Asian American respondents in the sample to be broken out into a separate analysis. As always, their responses are incorporated into the general population figures throughout this report. ↩

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Table of contents, social media fact sheet, 7 facts about americans and instagram, partisan differences in social media use show up for some platforms, but not facebook, 64% of americans say social media have a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in the u.s. today, most popular.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

clock This article was published more than  2 years ago

A whistleblower’s power: Key takeaways from the Facebook Papers

Interviews with dozens of current and former employees and a trove of internal documents show how the social media company inflamed real-world harms.

A personal decision by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg leads to a crackdown on dissent in Vietnam. Measures to suppress hateful, deceptive content are lifted after the American presidential election in 2020, as pro-Trump groups disputing the legitimacy of the election experience “meteoric” growth. A dummy test account on Facebook in India is flooded with violent anti-Muslim propaganda — which remains visible for weeks on the real account of a frightened Muslim college student in northern India.

A trove of internal Facebook documents reveals that the social media giant has privately and meticulously tracked real-world harms exacerbated by its platforms, ignored warnings from its employees about the risks of their design decisions and exposed vulnerable communities around the world to a cocktail of dangerous content.

Disclosed to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission by whistleblower Frances Haugen , the Facebook Papers were provided to Congress in redacted form by Haugen’s legal counsel. The redacted versions were reviewed by a consortium of news organizations, including The Washington Post, which obtained additional internal documents and conducted interviews with dozens of current and former Facebook employees.

A mix of presentations, research studies, discussion threads and strategy memos, the Facebook Papers provide an unprecedented view into how executives at the social media giant weigh trade-offs between public safety and their own bottom line. Some of the documents were first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Here are key takeaways from The Post’s investigation:

Zuckerberg’s public claims often conflict with internal research

Haugen references Zuckerberg’s public statements at least 20 times in her SEC complaints, asserting that the CEO’s unique degree of control over Facebook forces him to bear ultimate responsibility for a litany of societal harms caused by the company’s relentless pursuit of growth.

The documents also show that Zuckerberg’s public statements are often at odds with internal company findings.

For example, Zuckerberg testified last year before Congress that the company removes 94 percent of the hate speech it finds before a human reports it. But in internal documents, researchers estimated that the company was removing less than 5 percent of all hate speech on Facebook.

Facebook spokeswoman Dani Lever denied that Zuckerberg “makes decisions that cause harm” and dismissed the findings, saying they are “based on selected documents that are mischaracterized and devoid of any context.”

The case against Mark Zuckerberg: How Facebook’s CEO chose growth and free speech over safety

Facebook dropped its guard before the Jan. 6 insurrection

During the run-up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the social media giant dialed up efforts to police content that promoted violence, misinformation and hate speech. But after Nov. 6, Facebook rolled back many of the dozens of measures aimed at safeguarding U.S. users. A ban on the main Stop the Steal group didn’t apply to the dozens of look-alike groups that popped up in what the company later concluded was a “coordinated” campaign, documents show.

By the time Facebook tried to reimpose its “break the glass” measures, it was too late: A pro-Trump mob was storming the U.S. Capitol.

Facebook officials said they planned exhaustively for the election and its aftermath, anticipated the potential for post-election violence, and always expected the challenges to last through the inauguration of President Biden on Jan. 20.

Inside Facebook, Jan. 6 violence fueled anger, regret over missed warning signs

Facebook fails to effectively police content in much of the world

For all Facebook’s troubles in North America, its problems with hate speech and misinformation are dramatically worse in the developing world. Documents show that Facebook has meticulously studied its approach abroad, and is well aware that weaker moderation in non-English-speaking countries leaves the platform vulnerable to abuse by bad actors and authoritarian regimes.

According to one 2020 summary, the vast majority of its efforts against misinformation — 84 percent — went toward the United States, the documents show, with just 16 percent going to the “Rest of World,” including India, France and Italy.

Though Facebook considers India a top priority, activating large teams to engage with civil society groups and protect elections, the documents show that Indian users experience Facebook without critical guardrails common in English-speaking countries.

Facebook’s Lever said the company has made “progress,” with “global teams with native speakers reviewing content in over 70 languages along with experts in humanitarian and human rights issues.”

“We’ve hired more people with language, country and topic expertise,” Lever said, adding that Facebook has “also increased the number of team members with work experience in Myanmar and Ethiopia to include former humanitarian aid workers, crisis responders and policy specialists.”

How Facebook neglected the rest of the world, fueling hate speech and violence in India

Facebook chooses maximum engagement over user safety

Zuckerberg has said the company does not design its products to persuade people to spend more time on them. But dozens of documents suggest the opposite.

The company exhaustively studies potential policy changes for their effects on user engagement and other factors key to corporate profits. Amid this push for user attention, Facebook abandoned or delayed initiatives to reduce misinformation and radicalization.

One 2019 report tracking a dummy account set up to represent a conservative mother in North Carolina found that Facebook’s recommendation algorithms led her to QAnon, an extremist ideology that the FBI has deemed a domestic terrorism threat, in just five days. Still, Facebook allowed QAnon to operate on its site largely unchecked for another 13 months.

“We have no commercial or moral incentive to do anything other than give the maximum number of people as much of a positive experience as possible,” Facebook’s Lever said, adding that the company is “constantly making difficult decisions.”

Facebook took years to implement a simple fix for anger and misinformation

Starting in 2017, Facebook’s algorithm gave emoji reactions like “angry” five times the weight as “likes,” boosting these posts in its users’ feeds. The theory was simple: Posts that prompted lots of reaction emoji tended to keep users more engaged, and keeping users engaged was the key to Facebook’s business.

The company’s data scientists eventually confirmed that “angry” reaction, along with “wow” and “haha,” occurred more frequently on “toxic” content and misinformation.

Last year, when Facebook finally set the weight on the angry reaction to zero, users began to get less misinformation, less “disturbing” content and less “graphic violence,” company data scientists found. Lever said that the company continues to work on its understanding of negative experience to reduce its spread.

Five points for anger, one for a ‘like’: How Facebook’s formula fostered rage and misinformation

Elizabeth Dwoskin, Shibani Mahtani, Cat Zakrzewski, Craig Timberg, Will Oremus and Jeremy Merrill contributed to this report.

A previous version of this article incorrectly described the content of congressional testimony by Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg testified that the company removes 94 percent of the hate speech it finds before a human reports it, not just that it removes 94 percent of the hate speech it finds. The article has been corrected.

Read the series: Facebook under fire

The Facebook Papers are a set of internal documents that were provided to Congress in redacted form by Frances Haugen’s legal counsel. The redacted versions were reviewed by a consortium of news organizations, including The Washington Post.

The trove of documents show how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has, at times, contradicted, downplayed or failed to disclose company findings on the impact of its products and platforms.

The documents also provided new details of the social media platform’s role in fomenting the storming of the U.S. Capitol . An investigation by ProPublica and The Washington Post found that Facebook groups swelled with at least 650,000 posts attacking the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory between Election Day and Jan. 6.

Facebook engineers gave extra value to emoji reactions, including ‘angry,’ pushing more emotional and provocative content into users’ news feeds.

Read more from The Post’s investigation:

Key takeaways from the Facebook Papers

Frances Haugen took thousands of Facebook documents. This is how she did it.

How Facebook shapes your feed

• What is the ‘metaverse’? Facebook says it’s the future of the Internet. October 28, 2021 What is the ‘metaverse’? Facebook says it’s the future of the Internet. October 28, 2021
• You’ve decided to quit Facebook. Here’s how to migrate your online life elsewhere. November 10, 2021 You’ve decided to quit Facebook. Here’s how to migrate your online life elsewhere. November 10, 2021
• Facebook privacy settings to change now September 23, 2021 Facebook privacy settings to change now September 23, 2021

Facebook Users - Classification Essay

Classification essay - facebook users.

tahanw13 5 / 19   Dec 23, 2012   #2 well written but you say "facebook" an annoying amount of times in the first paragraph.

blondie51295 2 / 5   Dec 23, 2012   #3 Well written and very informative. The last sentence doesn't make sense at all. Maybe say 'the friend seekers, the game addictts, and blog maniacs all have their very own reason to use Facebook.

169 Facebook Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best facebook topic ideas & essay examples, 🥇 most interesting facebook topics to write about, 📌 good essay topics on facebook, ✅ simple & easy facebook essay titles, ❓ research questions about facebook.

• Facebook Should Be Banned Essay (Privacy Invasion, Social Effects, etc.) Thus, Facebook can have such negative effects as privacy invasion, the destruction of relationships and it can even influence the development of society.
• Facebook Should Be Banned Although, Stay underscores that Facebook has a long way to go before it can be fully advantageous to businesses, the bottom line is that, the advent of Facebook has been of great importance to business […] We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 808 writers online Learn More
• Facebook Essay Talking to friends and relatives or family members is now possible with a single Facebook account which is a perfect platform to chat and communicate.
• Advantage and Disadvantage of Facebook It is important to agree that facebook has revolutionized the world in the realms of communication and other relevant networking provisions.
• Facebook’s Purchase of WhatsApp: Strategy Analysis In this case, the re-invention of the business model is expected to be achieved through the acquisition of the disruptive technology that changes the way in which people use text messages.
• Facebook’s Negative and Positive Effects on Children However, Facebook involves mainly the use of text and graphics to communicate; it therefore lessens a child’s time for social interaction and renders the child out of place in practical verbal communications and social skills.
• Banning of Social Media Such as Facebook from Schools Students, who spend most time using social media, such as Facebook and twitter, find it hard to concentrate in class because of the addictive nature of the social media.
• Facebook’s Business and Corporate-Level Strategies Some of the strategies on this level include the use of information that the users of Facebook provide to the company as a way to deliver targeted advertisements to their profile pages.
• Facebook Addiction in the Modern Society As a result of these occurrences, it has been proposed that Facebook is addictive since people appear to be hooked to the site and cannot keep away from it even considering the negative consequences.
• Sherman Alexie’s Facebook Sonnet Sherman Alexie’s Facebook sonnet illustrates the various ways in which the use of social media reduces face-to-face interaction and causes controversy.
• Advantages and Disadvantages of Using Facebook in Modern Society The availability and accessibility of Facebook on the mobile phones have aggravated the effect as almost every person can access the internet and be able to chat and interact with his/her friends on the site.
• Facebook Company’s PESTEL, SWOT, Five Forces Analyses All of the mentioned factors are opportunities for the company: stable economies will let the company expand, and the economic growth and raised incomes will allow users from developed countries purchase products and services.
• Facebook Effects on Our Self-Esteem The title of the article “Facebook envy: how the social network affects our self-esteem” speaks for itself: the author Andrea Shea reflects on the impact that the social media has on its users, and in […]
• Company Analysis: Facebook With the cooperation and support from the colleges, the company was able to bring in new users, for instance, by advising freshmen to check the school Facebook groups.
• The Effects of Facebook and Other Social Media on Group Mind and Social Pressure Members of a particular social network have to conform to certain principles that define the social group despite the difference of opinion.
• Law: Facebook and Cambridge Analytica Data Scandal The scandal triggered the growth of users dissatisfaction with the quality of services suggested to them and the lack of protection that resulted in the leak of information.
• “The Facebook Sonnet” by Alexie: Theme, Form, and Literary Devices When it comes to social media, Alexie thinks Facebook is a poor method to connect with people since it encourages them to retreat behind their computers. The Facebook Sonnet uses the enjambment and caesura approaches […]
• Influence of YouTube and Facebook on Business Two of the most influential and promising technologies in this age are the YouTube and Facebook, a social website. The impact of social media on business is remarkable and companies use YouTube to market their […]
• Facebook – Financial Statement Analysis The rationale of selection is derived on the basis of the company’s strong position in the social networking industry and its potential to attract new active customers.
• Electronic Crime: Online Predators on Facebook Facebook, as one of the many social network sites, will be addressed in this paper and after looking at the dangers that such sites pose to the contemporary world, a conclusion will be arrived at […]
• Facebook: Change and Innovation Moreover, the administrators of Facebook should lobby for a reduction on the charges levied to the company by organizations that monitor online trade.
• Discourse Community: Facebook Now, this social media is widespread, denoting that the people outside the community are familiar with it, assuming that this community represents a vast part of society.
• Facebook Usage in Business The page shows the popularity of Safaricom limited due to the comments made on their Facebook wall and credible attitude designated by the ‘likes’. This makes Safaricom and Facebook trustworthy to the customers.
• Facebook Ethics Aspects As much as business ethics applies to all issues that are supposed to be undertaken by businesses, they are expected to guide the general conduct of individuals and organizations at a given period of time.
• Facebook and Twitter: Privacy Policy The popularity of the networks, and the fact that they collect so much data, constitute the rationale for choosing Facebook and Twitter as the objects for the present research.
• Web 2.0 Platform: Facebook Greenstein argues that the popularity of Facebook has made many companies to include a link to the site in their websites.
• Classification of Facebook as a Communication Media Facebook is perhaps the largest and most effective social site that has converted the world into a small village where people can interact, socialize, and exchange information and ideas and do business free of geographical […]
• Facebook Network Globalization Perhaps, due to its easy and wide access to many people and the availability of web-enabled cellphones, Facebook has been a target by some authorities, mainly China and a host of Arab countries. In fact, […]
• Social Networking Site: Facebook, YouTube and Twitter Today, social networking sites, such as Facebook, Orkut, YouTube, Tagged, Twitter, and MySpace, are some of the most important forms of communication, connecting billions of people from all corners of the world at the click […]
• Facebook Corporate Social Responsibility Health Check No business can operate in a vacuum, so it is in a company’s long-term self-interest to ensure the prosperity and stability of the society it operates in.
• Should People Cancel Facebook? This seems to be a good and easy connection and it has attracted very many people who have registered and even uploaded their photographs. To solve the above problems it is important that people cancel […]
• Facebook and MySpace: Comparison of the Benefits and Negative Aspects If you are searching for a job, it is possible to find some with the help of these two communicators; it turns out to be one of the benefits of MySpace and Facebook as people […]
• Fired Over Facebook: Using Social Media to Complain As a result, the solution to the problem received a mixed response from the general public that was aware of the case.
• Social Media Metrics: Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter For an individual to share a video through YouTube there will be need for the individual to sign up for an account with YouTube.
• The Facebook Company’s Change Process Analysis Thus, Facebook has officially promised to include more information about the data the system collects and the data it shares, as well as the way the data is stored. As a result, Facebook faced numerous […]
• Cyberbullying Through Facebook at School: Teacher’s Actions Bullying poses a severe threat to the health and well-being of the child, and therefore attention to the incidents and their solution is necessary.
• The Facebook, Inc. vs. Banana Ads LLC: The Case Study The use of email was reasonably calculated because Facebook provided the court with confirmation of electronic address validity and proved the previous attempts to contact foreigners in person.
• Buying Real Ads on Facebook Ad Manager Having distributed the roles of administrators, analysts, and advertisers and using shared access to the account, the group created two multimedia ads and proceeded with purchasing by submitting them to the ad auction.
• Facebook and Safety, Security, and Privacy Issues The issue of security and privacy is one of the most pressing in the digital environment and the media. Common Sense Media and UNESCO promote the development and education of people in media literacy from […]
• Facebook and TripAdvisor Platforms for Restaurants Facebook allows for the utilization of photos of the interior and food as the main criteria for evaluating a restaurant. When people visit a restaurant’s page on the platforms, they immediately pay attention to the […]
• The Testimony of Frances Haugen: Facebook Violations Haugen’s answer is no: they are under the influence of Facebook users, and this disastrous impact has to stop. These are the ways Facebook violates CSR, and this is why governments need to take action.
• Analysis of Digital Promotion Based on Facebook’s Metaverse Rebranding It is important to note that despite the accusations and controversies that the company faced at the time of identity transformation, the process was conducted smoothly.
• Facebook Privacy Issue: Local, National, and Global Media Portrayals Common media consumers’ responses to the topic are similar, especially in relation to supporting Ireland’s movement against Facebook, but local media in California manifest excessive optimism regarding the breach’s influences compared to the other levels.
• Comparison of Facebook Profiles of Medical Facilities Based on the research of the Facebook page owned by Oschner Lafayette General, it is possible to conclude about the target audience.
• Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram Analysis Another type of social network is Snapchat, which is mainly used to apply filters and effects to the face. However, Snapchat is not available to use in a desktop version, which contradicts the idea of […]
• Is Facebook Making Us Sad: Emotions and Spillover Effects Nowadays, people can send a message that they have bought a new chandelier on WhatsApp, share a photo of it on Instagram, and do not forget to throw off a couple of memes on Facebook.
• Turning a Blind Eye to the Ethical Implications Associated With Facebook Glasses In order to present a clear and concise solution to the conundrum posed in the question of whether the company should purchase Facebook Glasses for the team, it is crucial to select one ethical theory […]
• Facebook’s Responsibility in Policing Depraved Videos These regulations control the functioning of social media sites and do not imply that the sites are responsible for what users post on the platforms.
• Facebook Privacy Policy and TRUSTe’s Certifications The purpose of this response is to apply TRUSTe’s policy writing guidelines to analyze the privacy policy of Facebook, Inc. The extensive use of lists, including the types of personal information and information about devices […]
• Earth and Sustainability Science Research Center on Facebook The goal is to increase the visibility of the research center to the public so that the interested persons can engage with the team.
• Facebook Compatibility With Padgett-Beale Cybersecurity Philosophy The purpose of this paper is to evaluate Facebook on the subject of cybersecurity and compatibility with Padgett-Beale’s cybersecurity philosophy and goals.
• “Facebook’s Unethical Experiment”: Brief Description of the Study In such research, it is necessary to ensure the rights of people, the voluntary nature of their participation, the preventive nature of the presentation of the results, and the warning of possible consequences.
• Researching Facebook Terms of Service Other areas are the respective rights and responsibilities of the users and the company, additional provisions, and links to other potentially relevant Terms and Policies.
• Should Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter Be Permanently Banned? Facebook lacks transparency and content monitoring; it also lacks a timely reaction to human rights violations in every country it is present, not only in the US. Nevertheless, in the same manner, it may be […]
• The Effect of Facebook Marketing on Sales of Commodities It is also worth noting that the Facebook company has the following social media platforms: Messenger, Whatsapp, Facebook, and Instagram.
• Facebook as an Effective Channel for Conducting Marketing Research To engage different age groups and attract more customers, global companies target their advertisements among both TV streams and users’ Facebook feeds news to increase the reach of their ads among adults as well as […]
• Organizational Behavior: Facebook and Apple It applies in circumstances where the conflict is between team members, and as a result, the most convenient means of changing the arrangement of the group is separating the personalities that were colliding.
• Facebook: Reflection of Race- and Gender-Based Narrative For example, the presentation of Egypt in the Book of Exodus shows the oppressed structure.”The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites, and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and […]
• Facebook and Privacy Facebook makes it easier for many individuals to share their ideas and thoughts. It supports effective communication and marketing.
• How Facebook Invades Privacy and Security Information Describe the Cambridge Analytica scandal Focus on the fact that the users technically consented to the data gathering without realizing it Describe the concerns voiced by the users after the discovery of the breach […]
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EssayFlow: A Comprehensive Review Of The AI-Powered Essay Writing Tool

Essayflow is an ai-powered essay writing platform designed to assist users in crafting human-like, undetectable, well-researched, plagiarism-free essays across various academic disciplines..

Meta: Explore EssayFlow, an innovative AI essay writer with undetectable AI essay outputs. This review covers its key features, pricing, and potential limitations.

In the modern academic landscape, where time is a precious commodity and the demand for high-quality writing is ever-increasing, students and professionals alike are turning to AI-powered writing tools to streamline their essay creation process.

Among the myriad options available, EssayFlow has emerged as a promising solution, offering undetectable AI essay writing with a unique blend of advanced AI technology and a user-friendly interface. In this comprehensive review, we'll delve into the features, strengths, and potential drawbacks of this innovative essay writing tool.

Overview of EssayFlow

EssayFlow is an AI-powered essay writing platform designed to assist users in crafting human-like, undetectable, well-researched, plagiarism-free essays across various academic disciplines. Developed with the goal of creating essays that avoid AI detection, EssayFlow leverages cutting-edge rewriting technology to provide a hassle-free writing experience.

At its core, EssayFlow aims to revolutionize the way students and professionals approach essay writing by offering a comprehensive suite of tools that cater to every stage of the writing process, from brainstorming and research to drafting, citation integration, and final polishing.

Key Features of EssayFlow

Here are the key features of EssayFlow that make it a powerful AI essay writing copilot.

1. Undetectable AI Essay Writing

EssayFlow's most prominent feature is its undetectable AI essay writing, which means it can create essay content undetectable by AI detectors. When crafting essays, EssayFlow mimics human writing styles and avoids using AI writing patterns, making sure you'll have high human scores on Turnitin, GPTZero, Originality.ai, and other AI detectors.

2. AI-Powered Writing Assistance

Another of EssayFlow's features is its AI-driven writing assistant, which helps users overcome writer's block and generate high-quality content. This AI-powered tool can assist with everything from outlining and structuring essays to generating coherent paragraphs and sentences based on user prompts or existing drafts.

3. Comprehensive Research and Citation Support

One of the standout features of EssayFlow is its integrated academic database, which provides users with access to a vast collection of scholarly sources, research papers, and peer-reviewed articles. This feature streamlines the research process, allowing users to easily find and incorporate relevant sources into their essays with the tool's built-in citation functionality.

4. Plagiarism Detection and Grammar Checking

To ensure the originality and quality of the written content, EssayFlow incorporates advanced plagiarism detection and grammar checking capabilities. The plagiarism checker scans the essay against a vast database to identify and flag any instances of potential plagiarism, while the grammar checker analyzes the text for grammatical errors, incorrect word usage, and inconsistent sentence structures.

5. Diverse Essay Styles and Formats

EssayFlow caters to a wide range of essay styles, including argumentative, narrative, descriptive, expository, and persuasive essays. Additionally, the tool supports various citation styles, such as APA, MLA, Chicago, and Harvard, making it a versatile choice for students and professionals across different academic disciplines.

6. User-Friendly Interface and Workflow

Despite its advanced capabilities, EssayFlow boasts a user-friendly interface that simplifies the essay writing process. The intuitive workflow guides users through each step, from uploading existing drafts or starting from scratch, to researching and integrating sources, polishing the content with AI-powered suggestions, and finally downloading the completed essay.

Why EssayFlow Stands Out from Other AI Essay Writers

While there are numerous AI essay writing tools available on the market, EssayFlow distinguishes itself by its undetectable AI writing capabilities. You'll get human-like essay content that avoids AI detection and is free from penalty.

And unlike some other tools that may prioritize speed over quality, EssayFlow encourages in-depth research and thoughtful writing, ensuring that the essays produced are not only well-written but also intellectually substantive.

Moreover, EssayFlow's smart essay generation feature facilitates the fluid and effortless expression of ideas, striking a balance between efficiency and scholarly depth. This approach sets EssayFlow apart from competitors that may sacrifice quality for expediency.

Free Plan and Affordable Pricing

One of the most appealing aspects of EssayFlow is its free plan, which allows users to experience the platform's core features without any financial commitment. The free plan provides access to the AI writing assistant, research database, and plagiarism checker, making it an excellent option for those looking to explore the tool's capabilities before committing to a paid subscription.

For users requiring advanced features or additional functionality, EssayFlow offers several affordable pricing plans tailored to meet varying needs and budgets. These paid plans unlock enhanced features such as unlimited essay generation, priority support, and access to premium academic resources.

Potential Considerations

While EssayFlow offers a comprehensive suite of features and an impressive AI-powered writing experience, it's important to note that this tool should not be considered a substitute for human effort, critical thinking, and subject matter expertise. Users should view EssayFlow as an aid to enhance their writing process rather than a means to completely automate it.

EssayFlow emerges as a powerful and innovative AI-powered essay writing tool, offering a comprehensive suite of features designed to create undetectable AI essay writing and streamline the essay creation process.

With its advanced AI writing assistance, comprehensive research and citation support, plagiarism detection, and user-friendly interface, EssayFlow provides a compelling solution for students and professionals seeking to enhance their essay writing experience.

Ultimately, EssayFlow presents a promising option for those seeking to leverage the power of AI in their essay writing endeavors, offering a balance between efficiency and scholarly rigor. Whether you're a student striving for academic excellence or a professional seeking to enhance your writing skills, EssayFlow is certainly worth exploring.

Disclaimer: The above sponsored content is non-editorial and has been sourced from a third party. NDTV does not guarantee, vouch for or necessarily endorse any of the above content, nor is responsible for it in any manner whatsoever.

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Facebook News tab will soon be unavailable as Meta scales back news and political content

FILE - The Facebook app is shown on a smart phone in Surfside, Fla., Friday, April 23, 2021. Meta will be sunsetting Facebook News in early April for users in the U.S. and Australia as the platform continues to deemphasize news and politics. The feature was shut down for users in the U.K., France and Germany last year. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee, File)

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Meta will be sunsetting Facebook News in early April for users in the U.S. and Australia as the platform further deemphasizes news and politics. The feature was shut down in the U.K., France and Germany last year.

Launched in 2019 , the News tab curated headlines from national and international news organizations, as well as smaller, local publications.

Meta says users will still be able to view links to news articles, and news organizations will still be able to post and promote their stories and websites, as any other individual or organization can on Facebook.

The change comes as Meta tries to scale back news and political content on its platforms following years of criticism about how it handles misinformation and whether it contributes to political polarization.

“This change does not impact posts from accounts people choose to follow; it impacts what the system recommends, and people can control if they want more,” said Dani Lever, a Meta spokesperson. “This announcement expands on years of work on how we approach and treat political content based on what people have told us they wanted.”

Meta said the change to the News tab does not affect its fact-checking network and review of misinformation.

But misinformation remains a challenge for the company, especially as the U.S. presidential election and other races get underway.

“Facebook didn’t envision itself as a political platform. It was run by tech people. And then suddenly it started scaling and they found themselves immersed in politics, and they themselves became the headline,” said Sarah Kreps, director of the Tech Policy Institute in the Cornell Brooks School of Public Policy who studies tech policy and how new technologies evolve over time. “I think with many big elections coming up this year, it’s not surprising that Facebook is taking yet another step away from politics so that they can just not, inadvertently, themselves become a political headline.”

Rick Edmonds, media analyst for Poynter, said the dissolution of the News tab is not surprising for news organizations that have been seeing diminishing Facebook traffic to their websites for several years, spurring organizations to focus on other ways to attract an audience, such as search and newsletters.

“I would say if you’ve been watching, you could see this coming, but it’s one more very hurtful thing to the business of news,” Edmonds said.

News makes up less than 3% of what users worldwide see in their Facebook feeds, Meta said, adding that the number of people using Facebook News in Australia and the U.S. dropped by over 80% last year.

However, according to a 2023 Pew Research study , half of U.S. adults get news at least sometimes from social media. And one platform outpaces the rest: Facebook.

Three in 10 U.S. adults say they regularly get news from Facebook, according to Pew, and 16% of U.S. adults say they regularly get news from Instagram, also owned by Meta.

Instagram users recently expressed dissatisfaction with the app’s choice to stop “proactively” recommending political content posted on accounts that users don’t follow. While the option to turn off the filter was always available in user settings, many people were not aware Meta made the change.

Facebook started paying users to post. A wave of spam and illicit account sales followed.

• In recent years, Meta started paying creators on Facebook.
• The payouts have incentivized a wave of spam and inauthentic behavior as creators try to cash in.
• There's a thriving trade in Facebook accounts eligible for monetization — all organized on Facebook.

The influencer had a directive for the 75,000 members of her Facebook Group.

"I need 50 people to show each other love RIGHT NOW," the Baltimore-based creator announced in late March. The response was immediate. Hundreds of replies poured in, showering affirmations and emoji reactions. 

"Let's go!!" said one. "You can't grow if you aren't putting yourself out there," replied another. "I'm ready to support everyone," added a third.

They weren't just trying to give each other an ego boost: There was money on the line. 

In recent years, Meta has started paying creators for engagement on Facebook. That's prompted a flood of spam and illicit account trading as users attempt to inflate their engagement numbers by any means necessary.

The Baltimore creator's group,  "META MONEY MAKERS Official," is just one of dozens of Facebook Groups that Business Insider identified, many with tens of thousands of members, dedicated to artificially inflating creators' reach. 

Other large groups focus on openly buying and selling accounts eligible for Facebook's monetization programs, despite a purported ban by the company on trading accounts.

The problem with all this is that it's fake. Facebook originally thrived by being a place where humans got online to connect with other real people. And Wall Street rewarded the company for that engagement because advertisers would pay to reach this authentic audience.

Now, there's a big question mark over activity on the world's biggest social network. Some creators' Facebook pages look vibrant, with thousands of followers and every photo and post they share accruing numerous comments, affirmations, and reactions. But the engagement is mostly coming from other creators seeking reciprocity, rather than actual users legitimately engaged by the content.

As Baltimore influencer recently quipped: "Let's get those numbers up and make some META money 🤪💵🤑"

A Meta spokesperson said the company prohibits "inauthentic engagement" and it is reviewing the Groups identified by BI.

Paying creators to stay competitive

In March 2023, when Facebook hit two billion daily active users, executive Tom Alison emphasized the importance of content creators to the app.

In practice, that meant paying them.

Funding creators is now par for the course for any social media company. YouTube has long offered ad revenue splits. TikTok's payment programs for creators helped power the short-form video app's meteoric rise.

Facebook has tried several of these programs in recent years. The Performance Bonus offering, first launched as a test in 2021 , has stuck around. It rewards creators whose posts are widely seen or engaged with, up to a predetermined cap. This was initially capped at $30,000 a month, then later rose to $55,000. In February, Meta removed the cap entirely.

While creators must be invited by Meta to join this program, it has steadily expanded and has become a prime target for manipulation. Users in their tens of thousands are searching for ways to drive up engagement artificially — and they're turning to another Facebook product, Groups, to achieve it.

Horse-trading lingo on Facebook Groups

There are dozens of groups on Facebook dedicated to inflating creator audiences. 

"Facebook 30K Performance Bonus Tips & Engagement" has 59,000 members. "$30k Performance Bonus" has almost 23,000. Creators use these Groups to ask people to mutually engage with their content on Facebook: Visit my page, like and comment on five of my posts, then I'll do the same for you . 

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There's an entire lingo to support this horse-trading: 

"F4F" stands for follow-for-follow: Follow me and I'll follow back . 

R4R is reel-for-reel: W atch and engage with my reels, and I'll do likewise .

"10/10" is a request for someone to engage with ten of your posts in return for the same. 

As one one creator from Georgia put it in January: "Lets engage !! I want the free bag from Meta 20/20"

Some Performance Bonus-chasers offer advice to others. "If youre not in 10 new groups a day minimum you may want to reevaluate your financial goals to a more realistic number," wrote one user in September 2023 , urging people to post relentlessly on Facebook. 

Another recommended using AI to create pictures, like the wave of AI-generated spam that has gone viral on Facebook : "USE THAT CONTENT WHICH PEOPLE LIKE THE MOSTS . FOR EXAMPLE , ANIMALS , EMOTIONAL PICS , PHOTOGRAPHY QUOTES, AI GENERATED IMAGES."

Avoiding Facebook bans

Facebook officially bans this kind of inauthentic behavior, and users take rudimentary steps to try to avoid detection. 

"When you make post for engagement. PLEASE refrain from using the normal words," wrote an administrator for "Maniifesting 55k (META}🤑" , a Facebook Group with 6,500 members. "PLEASE use let's work- let's run - get me and I'll get you back - let's clock in - let's show love to each other things of that Nature so it doesn't hurt the group you or anyone else."

Meta has grappled with varying flavors of engagement manipulation for years. People buying bot followers on Instagram was a perennial problem, and in 2018 it cracked down on a wave of Instagram-focused "engagement pod" groups on Facebook after a BuzzFeed News report on the practice.

But the scale and enduring popularity of the Groups in 2024 indicates that Facebook's efforts to moderate them on an ongoing basis are falling short — especially now there's a direct financial incentive to misbehave. 

Trading Facebook accounts

For the most enterprising and time-pressed users looking to make a quick buck off Facebook, there's another option: Just buy a Performance Bonus-eligible account outright. 

Buying and selling Facebook accounts is prohibited, but a bustling trade in Performance Bonus accounts is thriving in some of the Groups. 

The 22,000-member "$30k Performance Bonus" Group hosts a mix of posts begging for engagement and people openly selling Facebook accounts.

"Performance Bonus Tricks and Filling," with 17,000 members, has little else but people asking to buy or sell accounts. And there are region-specific Groups, such as "Học Viện Facebook Adbreak - Reels & Performance Bonus" and its 10,000 members. 

Performance Bonus eligibility isn't the only trait that makes an account attractive. Ones that have qualified for ads on Reels, Meta's short-form video platform, or that can receive Stars (digital tokens) are also valuable. Accounts are sometimes advertised as "all green" — a reference to a Facebook user dashboard that shows criteria for monetization that the user qualifies for in green. 

Facebook scammers aren't only interested in Facebook, though. The social network is home to a wide variety of engagement-gaming groups focused on other apps, too. 

"Youtube sub4sub" and its 156,000 members is just one of numerous Facebook Groups for YouTube creators trying to grow their subscriber count. The 154,000-member "Youtube watch time group" helps users drive up total watch-time counts on their accounts.

TikTok also attracts attention, with the 164,000-member Group "tiktok followers" frequently used for buying and selling TikTok accounts. The 29,000-member "TikTok Monitization Free Tips&Tricks + (Buying & Selling)" Group is explicitly focused on the sale of accounts eligible for monetization.

Facebook bans "inauthentic" behavior

Facebook's policies around monetization stipulate that creators can't engage in any behavior to artificially grow or amplify their audience, a spokesperson told BI.

"Inauthentic engagement is a violation of our Partner Monetization Policies, and when we find anyone actually violating these policies, we take action," they said in a statement.

The company is currently reviewing the dozens of groups identified, the spokesperson added.

As of press time, the "META MONEY MAKERS Official 💰💙💰" group was still active.

Watch: Tinder is 'obsessively' thinking about how to reach Gen Z, says CMO Melissa Hobley

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Facebook let Netflix peek into user DMs, explosive court docs claim

The court documents were unsealed last week and form part of a major anti-trust lawsuit.

Facebook privacy lapses showed gross negligence, but no crime: Judge Napolitano

Facebook privacy lapses

The social media giant Meta allegedly allowed Netflix to access Facebook users' direct messages for nearly a decade, breaking anti-competitive activities and privacy rules, explosive court documents claim.

The court documents, which were unsealed last week, are part of a major anti-trust lawsuit filed by U.S. citizens Maximilian Klein and Sarah Grabert, who claim Netflix and Facebook "enjoyed a special relationship" so that Netflix could better tailor its ads with Facebook .

Facebook received millions of dollars in ad revenue from Netflix as part of these close ties, guaranteeing ad spending of $150 million in 2017, the lawsuit claims. 

Social media giant Meta allegedly allowed Netflix to peek into Facebook users' direct messages, court documents claim. (Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images | Photo Illustration by Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via / Getty Images)

APPLE, GOOGLE, META TARGETED IN EU'S FIRST DIGITAL MARKETS ACT INVESTIGATIONS

The lawsuit also claims Netflix's co-founder, Reed Hastings, joined Facebook’s board of directors and then was instrumental in the closure of Facebook Watch – a streaming service competitor to Netflix.

The lawsuit was filed in April 2023 and demands the court have Hastings respond to the plaintiff’s claims.

"For nearly a decade, Netflix and Facebook enjoyed a special relationship. Netflix bought hundreds of millions of dollars in Facebook ads; entered into a series of agreements sharing data with Facebook; received bespoke access to private Facebook APIs; and agreed to custom partnerships and integrations that helped supercharge Facebook’s ad targeting and ranking models," the lawsuit states.

APIs (application programming interface) are pieces of software that allow two or more computer programs or components to communicate and share information with each other.

The API agreement allowed "Netflix programmatic access to Facebook’s private messages inboxes, in exchange Netflix would ‘provide to FB a written report every two weeks that shows daily counts of recommendations sends and recipient clicks by interface, initiation surface, and/or implementation variation (e.g. Facebook vs. non-Facebook recommendation receipts).’"

"In August 2013, Facebook provided Netflix with access to its so-called ‘Titan API,’ a private API that allowed a whitelisted partner to access, among other things, Facebook users’ ‘messaging app and non-app friends,’" the documents claim.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg established Meta in 2021. (Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)

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Meta has said in the past that it does not disclose people’s private messages to partners without their knowledge and that the API access only gave partners an ability to reach inboxes, i.e. to send messages to users via API.

"Meta didn’t share people’s private messages with Netflix," a Meta spokesperson told Fox Business on Tuesday. "As the document says, the agreement allowed people to message their friends on Facebook about what they were watching on Netflix, directly from the Netflix app. Such agreements are commonplace in the industry. We are confident the facts will show this complaint is meritless."

FOX Business also reached out to Netflix for further comment but did not immediately receive a response. Facebook changed its name to Meta in 2021 as its CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled metaverse, a virtual reality space.

In 2018, the New York Times published a report citing hundreds of pages of Facebook documents , alleging Facebook had authorized Spotify and Netflix to access users' DMs. 

The publication reported that the connections helped Facebook gain explosive growth and bolstered its ad revenue streams. 

Meta has already been fined for sharing users' information without permission. 

In 2022, Ireland fined Meta $284 million after data about more than half a billion users was leaked online. 

Netflix logo is displayed in a photo illustration, Jan. 23, 2023. (Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via / Getty Images)

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Full names, phone numbers, locations and birthdays of users who used the platform between 2018 and 2019 were leaked online by a "bad actor" who Meta said exploited a security vulnerability, reports the Daily Mail.

That same year, Meta agreed to pay $725 million to settle a security breach case related to Cambridge Analytica, a British social media engineering company.

The firm had paid Facebook for access to the personal information of about 87 million Facebook users, which was then used to target U.S. voters during the 2016 campaign that culminated in Donald Trump's election win.

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