Moving Beyond Engagement: Optimizing Facebook's Algorithms for Human Values

The text discusses the challenges of using engagement-based metrics in social media platforms, highlighting how these metrics often prioritize toxic content over meaningful interactions. It proposes an alternative approach of using human evaluation to measure the quality of social media interactions, focusing on whether content fosters closer relationships among users. This method involves using human raters to assess posts based on how they make users feel connected to friends and family, rather than simply optimizing for clicks and engagement. The text suggests that platforms like Facebook could benefit from adopting these human-centered metrics, which align more closely with core product principles, to create a more positive user experience. The approach is likened to search engines that prioritize relevance over clicks, underscoring the potential for application across various social media platforms to mitigate the adverse effects of engagement-driven algorithms.