Will Asia now get tough on Big Tech?

Many on the Ting Kau Bridge as the sun sets are returning home to the western New Territories while others head for Kowloon.

Here we are again having yet another debate on how social media is broken, and whether it can be fixed. This time, the global conversation is fuelled by hard evidence.

In recent weeks I have spent an inordinate amount of time parsing the Facebook Papers.

The reports, based on a vast trove of documents supplied by ex-Facebook insider-turnedwhistle-blower Frances Haugen, have triggered fresh hand-wringing among authorities on how to regulate Big Tech. Haugen, who has testified to lawmakers in the United States, Britain and Europe, made a sobering pronouncement: propagating anger and hate, she said, was the “easiest way to grow on Facebook”.

For me, among the most startling details from the Facebook Papers was the revelation that its engineers for three years from 2017 to 2019 gave emoji reactions such as “love”, “haha”, “sad” and “angry” five times the weight of a traditional “like”.

Facebook went ahead with the plan despite its own researchers noting that this policy of favouring “controversial” posts could lead to more spam, clickbait and abuse.

Later, data showed that posts that elicited the angry emoji were disproportionately likely to include “misinformation, toxicity and low quality news,” reported The Washington Post, one of the members of the reporting consortium. This meant “Facebook for three years systematically amped up some of the worst of its platform”, the newspaper said.

Although Facebook later rectified the flaw, the revelation offers hard evidence to researchers’ years-old hypothesis that while social media platforms claim they are neutral, they in fact amplify and reward outrage.

In August, before Haugen began leaking the documents, Yale University published a study of 12.7 million tweets from 7,331 users that found that users who received more “likes” and “retweets” when they expressed outrage in a tweet were more likely to express further outrage in later tweets.

These observations invariably must lead to some reforms down the road.

One interesting proposal worth consideration is the introduction of nuance and aggression filters to platforms. The filters will allow users to weed out posts by those who strip away complexities and are overly confrontational in their posts.

If people are disincentivised to gratuitously evoke outrage, it could lead to healthier online discourse.

Here in Asia, it would bode well for governments to nudge internet companies to urgently consider such reforms instead of allowing them to evolve at their own pace.