I’ve seen more images of dead people in the past three weeks than I’ve seen in my entire life,” a Facebook researcher in India wrote in 2019 after following recommendations by the social network’s algorithms for three weeks.
The Facebook Papers, recently obtained by New York Times and other US publications. They show the social media giant struggling to tame the avalanche of fake news, hate speech, and inflammatory content -“celebrations of violence”, among other things – out of India, the network’s biggest market.
This was made worse, reported the New York Times, by failure to deploy enough resources in India’s 22 officially recognised languages and a lack of cultural sensitivity.
A Facebook spokesperson told me that the findings had led the company to undertake a “deeper, more rigorous analysis” of its recommendation systems in India and contributed to “product changes to improve them”.
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