A YouTube spokeswoman, Andrea Faville, said that Mr. Saladino’s video had received fewer than 5 percent of its views this year, and that it was not being widely recommended by the company’s algorithms. Mr. Saladino recently reposted the video to Facebook, where it has gotten several million more views.
In some ways, social media has helped Black Lives Matter simply by making it possible for victims of police violence to be heard. Without Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, we might never have seen the video of Mr. Floyd’s killing, or known the names of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery or other victims of police brutality. Many of the protests being held around the country are being organized in Facebook groups and Twitter threads, and social media has been helpful in creating more accountability for the police.
But these platforms aren’t just megaphones. They’re also global, real-time contests for attention, and many of the experienced players have gotten good at provoking controversy by adopting exaggerated views. They understand that if the whole world is condemning Mr. Floyd’s killing, a post saying he deserved it will stand out. If the data suggests that black people are disproportionately targeted by police violence, they know that there’s likely a market for a video saying that white people are the real victims.
The point isn’t that platforms should bar people like Mr. Saladino and Ms. Owens for criticizing Black Lives Matter. But in this moment of racial reckoning, these executives owe it to their employees, their users and society at large to examine the structural forces that are empowering racists on the internet, and which features of their platforms are undermining the social justice movements they claim to support.
They don’t seem eager to do so. Recently, The Wall Street Journal reported that an internal Facebook study in 2016 found that 64 percent of the people who joined extremist groups on the platform did so because Facebook’s recommendations algorithms steered them there. Facebook could have responded to those findings by shutting off groups recommendations entirely, or pausing them until it could be certain the problem had been fixed. Instead, it buried the study and kept going.
As a result, Facebook groups continue to be useful for violent extremists. This week, two members of the far-right “boogaloo” movement, which wants to destabilize society and provoke a civil war, were charged in connection with the killing of a federal officer at a protest in Oakland, Calif. According to investigators, the suspects met and discussed their plans in a Facebook group. And although Facebook has said it would exclude boogaloo groups from recommendations, they’re still appearing in plenty of people’s feeds.