Tag Archives: Matt Motyl

I saw an article that the BBC put out last week. I must have missed it, because I tend to look at BBC news each day. So the article (at https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqj9kgxqjwjo) is giving us ‘Meta and TikTok let harmful content rise after evidence outrage drove engagement, say whistleblowers’ and here I am not really that clear why needed whistleblowers. The media has been doing this for the better part of a decade. These morning shows (what they call entertainment) are driven to push the boundaries of engagement. A carefully placed half witted word is all it takes to drive up engagement. And driven to all this is the digital dollar, because these pages also drive advertisement money for all concerned. As such it is to be expected that Meta and others (in this case TikTok) would be on that same horse. So whilst we are given “Social media giants made decisions which allowed more harmful content on people’s feeds, after internal research into their algorithms showed how outrage fuelled engagement, whistleblowers told the BBC. More than a dozen whistleblowers and insiders have laid bare how the companies took risks with safety on issues including violence, sexual blackmail and terrorism as they battled for users’ attention.” And this comes with the added “The whistleblowers who spoke to the BBC documentary, Inside the Rage Machine, offer a close-up view of how the industry responded following the explosive growth of TikTok, whose highly engaging algorithm for recommending short videos upended social media, leaving rivals scrambling to catch up. A senior Meta researcher, Matt Motyl, said the company’s competitor to TikTok, Instagram Reels, was launched in 2020 without sufficient safeguards. Internal research shared with the BBC showed comments on Reels had significantly higher prevalence of bullying and harassment, hate speech, and violence or incitement than elsewhere on Instagram.” I am not surprised and it comes with the added concerns that we aren’t being given here. You see, the word “Advertisement” isn’t given once in this article. And advertisement is driving this. Simply because advertisement is money, it is printed money that can be handed over anywhere and the second stage that the advertisement lobby is now quietly becoming a lot bigger than the NRA or the National Association of Realtors (NAR), which spent approximately $63.5 million in the USA, followed closely by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce at over $53 million. The advertisement lobby knows that they need to stand in the shadows (for now), so whilst we might think that the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), which  represents over 1,000 companies and 15,000 brands, focusing on marketing strategies and lobbying against restrictions on advertising, or the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s), they represent advertising agencies, focusing on industry standards and advocacy. And there are a few more. None of them is making any sounds to the setting of these settings, because their pennies are depending on all this and these pennies when multiplied by a few billion become a serious amount of money and that money is coming in every day through engagement and flames. So at what point will we see the deeper story behind all of this?

Because at some point this lobby becomes too large to be unseated and whilst the NRA is in the United States, the advertisement lobby is working on a global setting and no-one is taking that serious. So, whilst some agencies (locally) are vetting for legality, decency, and truthfulness. The moment it crosses borders they become pretty silent.

In this I wonder when the BBC takes up that baton and takes a much harder look at what they are leaving in the dirt. What parts of all this is not being picked up by anyone? 

These are simple question, but the answers might show that there is more to all this and that is seemingly not seen.

Have a great day.