We got a bunch of Facebook ad credits at Dublin Inquirer, and I've been spending them by "boosting" our articles so they go to a wider audience than they would "organically" if we just posted them and left them. And I learned something. 1/4

You can choose your goal for a post, and FB automatically seems to pick "engagement", meaning they'll show the post to people most likely to like or comment on the post, I guess. So on the first round of boosting articles, I let that be, and ... 2/4

all of a sudden, unusually for Dublin Inquirer, the comments below our posts were full of angry people shouting at each other and sometimes saying horrible racist, classist things. So I changed the goal, to getting people to click the link (and read the article) and ... 3/4

the battling below our FB posts virtually disappeared (and many more people started clicking through to actually read our articles). So, bottom line: you can basically pay FB to make people shout racist, classist, horrible shit at each other. That's pretty messed up. 4/4