You won’t find a diamond in your suggested Instagram reel

You can clean your browsing history as much as you want to try to get a more positive social feed. But enraging content will always find a way. And when it does, big tech platforms start earning big bucks.

A new BBC documentary has confirmed our long-held suspicions that big tech platforms turn a blind eye to harmful content for the sake of competition and profit. Algorithms reportedly favor misogynistic, sexist, racist, and conspiracy-driven posts as they drive higher engagement and, therefore, more advertising opportunities.

According to the report, based on accounts from a dozen whistleblowers and insiders, Meta engineers were instructed to allow more borderline content to compete with TikTok. Meanwhile, TikTok is said to have prioritized several cases involving politicians to "avoid threats of regulation or bans."

Unsurprisingly, big tech platforms have denied any wrongdoing, insisting that they do not amplify harmful content.

Algorithms are allegedly designed to better understand user interests and needs, and cater to them accordingly. Unfortunately, most of what a user "wants" turns out to be conspiracy theories, AI slop, deepfakes, and pro-Nazi content. Or at least the algorithm seems to think so, since most of this is so-called ragebait content designed to provoke a strong response from users, which it often does.

The humans behind the algorithm must clearly understand the disconnect here, but clicks translate to cash. So why would big tech cut the branch it's sitting on?

In 2024, Meta earned $16 billion, or 10% of its annual revenue, from scam ads and banned goods. This information comes not from a third-party analytics firm but from Meta's own documents, proving that the tech giant is well aware of the harm it can spread – and the money it can make along the way.

Meta has approximately 3.6 billion users. Last year, its revenue rose 22% to $200 billion, with most of that coming from advertising. The platform needs to keep its users engaged to grow its profits. We can only offer our best guesses about what it will cost to keep doing so.

While platforms and lawmakers take their sweet time debating what borderline content is, people are left to deal with the psychological fallout of social media addiction. From the inability to tell right from wrong or fake from real, loss of concentration, sleep, and even a sense of self, to radicalization, depression, and self-harm – the consequences of companies toying with their algorithms to meet business goals are dire for humanity.

It's not only our mental health that's at stake. Adversaries, well aware of algorithmic logic, abuse it to spread misinformation and straightforward lies, sowing division to influence elections all over the world, making us wonder just how much harm performative compliance has already done to democracy.

This week, we talked to Ievgen Medvediev, a Ukrainian software developer who moved to the Netherlands over a decade ago. Having grown tired of trying to distinguish real from fake news online, he decided to create a social network of his own. FolkPost is a platform that claims to rebel against bots, tracking, surveillance, and algorithmic manipulation.

It is a slippery slope to treat algorithms as mere code, machinery, or math. Constructing the narrative this way lets their creators somehow shake off the blame. But they are built by us, based on our faulty logic, and those algorithmic systems, at least in the case of warfare, are designed to maximize destruction.

Lucy Suchman explained this to us in the context of AI’s use for weapons of mass destruction. But don’t you think that these engagement-based algorithms, designed to prioritize topics that provoke heated discussion, will, in the end, simply maximize the destruction?

When algorithms are incentivized to push controversial and emotional tropes that disregard values like morality and truth, while rewarding engagement that appeals to our base instincts over content that’s inspirational, intellectually stimulating, or empathetic to our fellow human beings, where do you think that leads to?

There’s truth, and there’s hope, and there are grand ideas that would actually make the world a better place. But you won’t find them in a suggested YouTube short or Instagram reel.

Mostly, it’s just a bottomless can of worms.