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Facebook Papers – Here’s What They Say About the Ranking Algorithms That Control Your News Feed

This piece is part of Gizmodo’s ongoing effort to make the Facebook Papers available to the public. See the full directory of documents here. “…Today, as part of a rolling effort to make the Facebook Papers available publicly, Gizmodo is releasing a second batch of documents—37 files in all. In our first drop, we shared 28 files related to the 2020 election and the Jan 6. attack on the U.S. Capitol. Only a few of the pages had ever been shown to the public before. Gizmodo has partnered with a group of independent experts to review, redact, and publish the documents. This committee serves to advise and monitor our work and facilitate the responsible disclosure of the greatest number of documents in the public interest possible. We believe in the value of open access to these materials. Our collective goal is to minimize any potential harms that could result from the disclosure of certain methods by which Meta tackles sensitive issues like sex trafficking, disinformation, and voter manipulation. Today’s batch offers insight into how Meta chooses to rank the content submitted by its users. It’s a system that very few people seem to understand, a problem that the company appears short on clues how to solve. Choosing these documents as a follow-up to ones on the most important political events of the past two years speaks to how highly we consider their relevance to understanding Facebook’s effects on the world…”

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