“When it comes to reshares, you only like reshares on average from like your eight closest friends. … And unfortunately, content that can still get a reaction, even when it's a reshare, is much, much more likely to provoke extreme feelings because it has to get over that bias you have against reshared content. So they accidentally basically did this feature that poured gasoline on the most extreme content.”
The 404 Media Podcast · October 2026
Haugen, the former Facebook employee who took internal documents public, explaining a change to how the feed was ranked. By her account the company wanted people to post more, found that engagement was what got them to, and began rewarding posts for the reactions their reshares drew. She says nobody thought the side effect through in advance.
Transcript
…to create and they'll enjoy it enough that they will become the next generation of these creators. So they're facing this problem in like 2017, and they run a whole bunch of experiments to see if they induce you, Joe Schmo, into making more content. And they do things like artificially giving you
…rewarded for that downstream MSI. But the problem, and this is an example of like no one really thought this through in advance, there is an intrinsic bias against reshared content. So they have this inside of Facebook. They stack rank all your friends. They know how much you like all your friends,
or like at least content and engagement from your friends. Let's say from your friends, you like to receive content from your 50 closest friends, 100 closest friends. When it comes to reshares, you only like reshares on average from like your eight closest friends. Like you just don't like reshares. Like reshares are considered shittier. And unfortunately, content that can still get a reaction, even when it's a reshare, is much, much, much, much more likely to provoke extreme feelings because it has to get over that bias you have against reshared content. So they accidentally basically did this feature that poured gasoline on the most extreme content. And, you know, they made this decision for business reasons. They told people it was for warm and fuzzy reasons. And unfortunately, we all paid the consequence.
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So I totally agree with this assessment. And I want to take some personal responsibility. So when I worked at Pinterest, so Pinterest originally was you only got content from people you explicitly chose. So you heard from humans because you chose those humans. I think it was largely chronological.…
the thing you are most likely to reshare is a thing identical to the last thing you reshared. So think of it this way: like you're shopping for Daisy pillows. You want a nice daisy on this throw pillow in your thing. You add one to a board. Statistically speaking, the next thing you will add to the…
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