Facebook fed posts with violence and nudity to people with low digital literacy

Absolutely nothing new here, but it is important to keep everyone remembering how damaging Facebook is to its own users.

In another study, Facebook researchers conducted dozens of in-depth interviews and in-home visits with 18 real people from one city who they’d identified as vulnerable users with low digital literacy skills. The upsetting posts that permeated these users’ feeds, the study determined, caused them to disconnect from Facebook for long periods and exacerbated hardships they were already experiencing.

For instance, Facebook repeatedly showed a middle-aged Black woman posts about racial resentment and videos of people bullying children, threatening, and killing other people. A person who joined a Narcotics Anonymous Facebook group started seeing ads, recommendations, and posts about alcoholic beverages. Soon after another person started following coupon and savings pages, their feed became inundated with financial scams.

At this point how can anyone really feel good about using any Facebook property? The usage provided by everyone ignoring all of these horrible things is the revenue to keep driving the company to more and more "impact". You can do something. You can leave the service. When I say that to people they often tell me that all their friends are there. They won't disappear. Group texts, email, there are lots of ways to connect. Ways that don't involve pulling your "friends" into a caustic and damaging information environment.