Unintended Consequences

Snakes are scary. Venomous snakes are scarier. Perhaps that’s why, years ago, the British governor of colonial Delhi wanted to rid the city of cobras. In an attempt to accomplish this, he introduced a bounty: turn in a cobra skin, get some cash.

The governor was chagrined to discover that enterprising Indians began farming cobras to collect the bounty. Realizing that the program had backfired, the British canceled it, leaving the farmers with a lot of snakes and no end market. As such, the snakes were released, increasing the venomous cobra population of Delhi. The attempted solution made the problem worse, a class of unintended consequences known as the cobra effect.

Unfortunately, venom isn’t confined to poisonous snakes. Neither are unintended consequences.

Venom, vitriol, misinformation, and other types of bunk flourish online. Facebook has been at the center of a number of controversies in this area. For example, foreign interference in the 2016 US Presidential election. Links to fake news sites were one of the problems in 2016, notes Alex Stamos, former Chief Security Officer at Facebook and current director of the Sanford Internet Observatory, in this podcast with Kara Swisher.

In the aftermath of the election brouhaha, Facebook adjusted its algorithm to serve more user generated content and fewer links to outside sources. Posts that spurred conversation were given higher visibility in News Feed. As an area rich in user generated content, post from Facebook Groups benefited from the…