Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • The Atlantic

    I Made the World’s Blandest Facebook Profile, Just to See What Happens

    My new Facebook account had the most generic interests possible, and still it brought me to a place no one should ever have to go.
    by Kaitlyn Tiffany Nov 19, 2021 8 minutes
    Source: Getty; The Atlantic

    In 2019, a researcher at Facebook conducted an experiment to see whether the platform really has a tendency to send users down a rabbit hole of extreme and conspiratorial content. The employee set up a pair of fake profiles—for Trump-supporting “Carol Smith” and Bernie-loving “Karen Jones”—and then led each one down the path of least resistance, liking whichever groups and pages Facebook’s recommendation system served up. Not a huge surprise: It took less than a week for Carol to be pushed toward online communities dedicated to QAnon, and for Karen to be swamped by lewd anti-Trump material.

    The details of this experiment were found among the thousands of documents shared with reporters last month by the whistleblower and former Facebook employee Frances Haugen; “Carol’s Journey to QAnon,” in particular, has featured heavily in coverage. But the mere existence of the rabbit hole wasn’t shocking in itself. In 2017, the reporter Ryan Broderick published a bloggy version of the same idea at BuzzFeed News: “I Made a Facebook Profile, Started Liking Right-Wing Pages, and Radicalized My News Feed in Four Days.” When that piece came out, Facebook responded, “This isn’t an experiment; it’s a stunt.” Now we know that Broderick’s stunt produced, if nothing else, a replicable result.

    Carol’s journey, like Karen’s and Broderick’s, addressed specific, urgent questions about how Facebook might polarize and confusewent with the Republican National Committee and then–White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, as well as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Taken all together, they show how Facebook’s mechanics, left unchecked, can grab ahold of even the slightest political leaning and bend it to grotesque extremes.

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from The Atlantic

    The Atlantic5 min read
    The Strangest Job in the World
    This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. The role of first lady couldn’t be stranger. You attain the position almost by accident, simply by virtue of being married to the president
    The Atlantic6 min read
    The Happy Way to Drop Your Grievances
    Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. In 15th-century Germany, there was an expression for a chronic complainer: Greiner, Zanner, which can be translated as “whiner-grumbler.” It was no
    The Atlantic6 min read
    There’s Only One Way to Fix Air Pollution Now
    It feels like a sin against the sanctitude of being alive to put a dollar value on one year of a human life. A year spent living instead of dead is obviously priceless, beyond the measure of something so unprofound as money. But it gets a price tag i

    Related Books & Audiobooks