Last Night on Late Night

Late night hosts dislike Facebook's supercharged anger emoji and baked-in 'hate and lies'

Thanks to extreme weather, New York is "in a state of emergency — or as Facebook calls it, Tuesday," Jimmy Fallon said on Tuesday's Tonight Show. "Everyone's been talking about Facebook lately, and Mark Zuckerberg just announced that he's 'retooling' the social media platform toward young adults and away from older users. Honestly, just make it a little harder to sign in and you'll never see an old person on Facebook again."

The gist of the Facebook Papers "is that Facebook knew its technology was amplifying hate speech and misinformation," Jimmy Kimmel said on Kimmel Live. Essentially, they've known for years that "hate and lies are baked directly into Facebook, like the cheese in a stuffed-crust pizza from Pizza Hut. And another interesting detail is that Facebook engineers, they will prioritize the posts that get a lot of emoji reactions, including the anger emoji, by five-to-one over the regular Like. The hate and the lies on Facebook, it's like the nicotine in cigarettes — it's not what you come for, but it's why you stick around."

"Facebook isn't the only go-to spot for these misinformation super-spreaders," Kimmel said. "A lot of these pandummies have been popping up at public hearings and school board meetings to complain about mask wearing and to share conspiracy theories." He showed a highlight reel, packaged as "Clown Hall."

"Right now there's a big movement among conservatives to protect children from being exposed to liberal ideas in school, ideas like 'racism is bad' or 'gays are not bad,'" Trevor Noah said on The Daily Show. "And now this issue has been injected into the Virginia governors race with a striking new TV ad from Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin." In the ad, a woman says her son, when he was a high school senior in AP English, was traumatized by reading an "explicit" novel — Toni Morrison's Beloved.

"I'm sorry, guys, but any parent who thinks their 17-year-old son's school assignment is too explicit, they need to check out his browser history," Noah said. "And this shows you that the real dangerous ideology in America isn't conservatism or liberalism, it's helicopter parenting."

Noah also weighed in on "the worst PR week in Facebook history. "That's right, Facebook knew it was rewarding sh--ty posts as long as they generated an emotional response," he said. "And I'll be honest, when I first heard about this, I was shocked. Because I couldn't believe that Mark Zuckerberg knows what emotions are."