In 2017, the reporter Ryan Broderick published a bloggy version of the same idea at BuzzFeed News: “I Made a Facebook Profile, Started Liking Right-Wing Pages, and Radicalized My News Feed in Four Days.” When that piece came out, Facebook responded, “This isn’t an experiment it’s a stunt.” Now we know that Broderick’s stunt produced, if nothing else, a replicable result.Ĭarol’s journey, like Karen’s and Broderick’s, addressed specific, urgent questions about how Facebook might polarize and confuse American voters. But the mere existence of the rabbit hole wasn’t shocking in itself. The details of this experiment were found among the thousands of documents shared with reporters last month by the whistleblower and former Facebook employee Frances Haugen “ Carol’s Journey to QAnon,” in particular, has featured heavily in coverage. Not a huge surprise: It took less than a week for Carol to be pushed toward online communities dedicated to QAnon, and for Karen to be swamped by lewd anti-Trump material.
The employee set up a pair of fake profiles-for Trump-supporting “Carol Smith” and Bernie-loving “Karen Jones”-and then led each one down the path of least resistance, liking whichever groups and pages Facebook’s recommendation system served up. In 2019, a researcher at Facebook conducted an experiment to see whether the platform really has a tendency to send users down a rabbit hole of extreme and conspiratorial content.
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