In 2017, the reporter Ryan Broderick published a bloggy version of the same idea at BuzzFeed News: вЂњI Made a Facebook Profile, Started Liking Right-Wing Pages, and Radicalized My News Feed in Four Days.вЂќ When that piece came out, Facebook responded, вЂњThis isnвЂ™t an experiment itвЂ™s a stunt.вЂќ Now we know that BroderickвЂ™s stunt produced, if nothing else, a replicable result.Д¬arolвЂ™s journey, like KarenвЂ™s and BroderickвЂ™s, addressed specific, urgent questions about how Facebook might polarize and confuse American voters. But the mere existence of the rabbit hole wasnвЂ™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 вЂњ CarolвЂ™s Journey to QAnon,вЂќ 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 вЂњCarol SmithвЂќ and Bernie-loving вЂњKaren JonesвЂќ-and then led each one down the path of least resistance, liking whichever groups and pages FacebookвЂ™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.

Simply being facebook