Facebook Papers about bridging

A number of Facebook Papers — documents leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021 — describe internal research efforts conducted at Facebook which are relevant to the idea of bridging.

• 2020 H2 in Review: Diverse Positive Motifs Can Improve Civic Conversations (11 Jan 2021)

  Describes work exploring the use of “motifs” (namely, “patterns of engagement between people”) as a ranking signal. In particular, the work found that “content that receives engagement from a diverse audience tend to have much higher quality compared to content that a homogenous audience engages with”. This document was provided to us by journalist Casey Newton with permission to make it publicly available.

• [WIP] Product Brief: Improving Civic Conversations with Conversational Motifs (date unclear)

  Describes a proposal to improve the quality and inclusiveness of civic conversations by placing greater weight on positive motifs as a ranking signal in civic conversations. This document was provided to us by journalist Casey Newton with permission to make it publicly available.

• MSI Metric Changes for 2020 H1 (22 Jan 2020)

  States an intention to “continue working on comment motifs / conversation quality”. This document has been published by Gizmodo.

• News Feed Research: Looking Back on H2 2020 (17 Feb 2021)

  Describes efforts to understand and improve conversation quality, and efforts to measure the impact of interventions. This document has been published by Gizmodo.