Meta’s efforts to refute the idea that Facebook promotes disruptive political and evasive content are not going exactly as the company would have hoped.
Last year, Meta had published its first-ever ‘Widely Viewed Content’ report for Facebook, which highlighted the most popular Facebook posts every day, based on listings from Facebook’s own CrowdTangle monitoring platform.
The listings were easily dominated by right-wing spokespeople and pages, which gave the impression that the platform promoted this type of content specifically, via its algorithms. While the company did try to contest such claims, Meta’s recently shared Widely Viewed Content report for the last quarter doesn’t seem to be any different either.
The first listed page here was the most viewed for the last quarter, which the company had previously been using as proof that its platform isn’t a negative influence. It has actually been taken down by Meta itself quite mysteriously for violating its community standards and content policies.
Data Mining Scam?
It was a meme page called That Ain’t Right, full of bad food, trash memes, and a dash of sexual remarks. Speculations reveal that the page was taken down under suspicion of being a data-mining scam, but it wasn’t until after it had hit nearly 122 million views between October and December.
The page was taken down by Facebook sometime in January, with the page completely wiped out, there are still some images of posted memes from the account appearing on Google search results.
The memes were intricately designed to encourage engagement from Facebook users, such as invitations to do mental math or think of names for big dogs, spot the difference games, as well as insinuating images of sausage and breakfast meats, bagels with onions that looked like breasts, and other sexual remarks.
Violating Guidelines
A Facebook spokesperson also confirmed that the page had been banned for good, due to repeated violations of cybersecurity and inauthentic behavior policies. He added:
Pages removed for these sorts of violations use prohibited tactics to increase the popularity of their posts, such as using fake accounts and spamming other users.
The page had previously been identified in the company’s third-quarter transparency report as well, being the seventh most-viewed page, with over 112 million views. Now, in the company’s most recent report published on Tuesday, a lot of the most-viewed Facebook content links back to @thataintrightofficial TikTok account. However, TikTok has also taken down that account and none of its posts are available on the platform.
Back in 2021, That Ain’t Right was called out as a scam page by an affiliate of The Ecommerce Foundation, an industry group based in Europe. It warned users, saying that the Facebook page aimed at driving engagement to mine people’s data.
