Meaningful Social Interactions was meant to make your feed feel more human. Leaked documents suggest it also taught the internet that anger pays.
Last month, I sat in a room at the Toronto International Film Festival wearing Meta’s new VR glasses and asked the first question I always ask about a new device: how much data is it collecting? I came out of that demo a convert to the hardware. But the question stuck with me, and it is the same question at the center of Aaron Sorkin‘s The Social Reckoning, now in theaters. Before you see it, there is one acronym worth knowing, because the movie’s drama turns on it and so does a good part of your daily scroll: MSI, or Meaningful Social Interactions.
So Actually is MSI?
In January 2018, Facebook overhauled how its News Feed decided what you see. Mark Zuckerberg announced that the platform would prioritize posts that sparked “meaningful social interactions” between people, especially friends and family, over passive content from brands and publishers. On paper, it was a wholesome correction: less scrolling past viral videos, more talking to people you actually know.
To make that work, the system had to put a value on interaction. According to internal documents later reported by The Wall Street Journal, a like was worth one point. A reaction or a reshare without comment was worth five. A significant comment, message or reshare could be worth 30. The more of those high-value interactions a post was predicted to generate, the more people the algorithm showed it to.
Where It Went Wrong
The flaw is simple to describe and hard to fix. An algorithm counting engagement cannot easily tell the difference between a warm conversation and a furious argument. Both generate comments. Both generate shares. And anger, it turned out, generates a lot of both.
Facebook’s own researchers warned that the approach had “unhealthy side effects” on political and news content. Publishers noticed first. BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti reportedly told Facebook that divisive posts were thriving while other work struggled. Political parties noticed next: internal documents described a party in Poland that shifted its posts from roughly half negative to about 80 percent negative because attacks performed better. The “angry” reaction, introduced in 2016, was for a time weighted more heavily than a like, until researchers found that content drawing it was more likely to be toxic, misleading or low quality.
None of this means Facebook invented polarization, an argument the company has made itself. It does mean a ranking choice made in a conference room can reshape how millions of people, publishers and politicians decide to talk.
Why It Matters in the Movie
The Social Reckoning dramatizes how those internal findings reached the public. Mikey Madison plays Frances Haugen, the Facebook product manager who copied tens of thousands of pages of documents, and Jeremy Allen White plays Jeff Horwitz, the Wall Street Journal reporter whose 2021 series, The Facebook Files, made MSI part of the public vocabulary. In our review, we called the film a gripping, furious thriller, and its sharpest scenes are the ones where executives debate a metric rather than a moral choice. (Sorkin, fittingly, first screened it a short drive from Meta’s headquarters.)
What It Means for the Rest of Us
Here is the part that is easy to miss: incentives cut both ways. Algorithms reward what people respond to, and people respond to anger, but they also respond to things that are real.
Today, for example, The Cinema Group posted that we are hiring, because we are. It was not a hot take or a pile-on. It was a plain announcement, and it drew roughly 30 times our usual engagement, and counting, because people shared it with friends who might want the job and commented to ask about it. That is, in a small way, exactly what Meaningful Social Interactions was supposed to reward.
The lesson of the Facebook Files is not that engagement is bad. It is that a system which cannot tell the difference between connection and conflict will end up paying for both. Meta is now asking Hollywood to trust it with the next great screen, and from what I saw in Toronto, the hardware deserves that trust. Whether the incentives behind it do is the question The Social Reckoning leaves hanging, and it is one worth asking every time you open an app.
