'It let white supremacists organize': the toxic legacy of Facebook's Groups
Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO, announced last week the platform will no longer algorithmically recommend political groups to users in an attempt to “turn down the temperature” on online divisiveness.
But experts say such policies are difficult to enforce, much less quantify, and the toxic legacy of the Groups feature and the algorithmic incentives promoting it will be difficult to erase.
“This is like putting a Band-Aid on a gaping wound,” said Jessica J González, the co-founder of the anti-hate speech group Change the Terms. “It doesn’t do enough to combat the long history of abuse that’s been allowed to fester on Facebook.”
Groups – a place to create ‘meaningful social infrastructure’
Facebook launched , a feature that allows people with shared interests to communicate on closed forums, in 2010, but began to make a more concerted effort to promote the feature around 2017 after the Cambridge Analytica scandal cast a shadow on the platform’s
