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A Small Group of Journalists Control and Decide What Should Trend On Facebook (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader writes: According to five former members of Facebook's trending news team, "news curators" as they're known internally, Zuckerberg and company take a downright dim view of the media industry and its talent. In interviews with Gizmodo, these former curators described grueling work conditions, humiliating treatment, and a secretive, imperious culture in which they were treated as disposable outsiders. After doing a tour in Facebook's news trenches, almost all of them came to believe that they were there not to work, but to serve as training modules for Facebook's algorithm." "We choose what's trending," said one former news curator. From personal experience I can share a similar incident. An Indian outlet extensively wrote about flaws in Facebook's Free Basics. Few days later, "Ban [that outlet's name]" was trending on Facebook. Clicking on it, for the first few hours, literally didn't return any relevant result, as nobody was talking about it, and no media outlet had written about it. It was after more than a day or so after this fabricated item kept trending that some other outlets started to write about it. (That's common in the media industry: writing about trending topics.) In the past, we've also seen Facebook employees ask whether the company should do anything to stop Donald Trump from becoming the president.
So, a bunch of "news curators" (journalists???) take a job with Facebook and fail to understand who and what Facebook is, which is not a purportedly "unbiased" news source or service such as a major newspaper or other news gathering entity, and after discovering what just about everyone with a brain understands about Facebook, they are now but-hurt? As far as âoean Indian outletâ that pissed Facebook off, well, you know? Facebook is a company that can do what they want with their product.
After doing a tour in Facebook's news trenches, almost all of them came to believe that they were there not to work, but to serve as training modules for Facebook's algorithm."
Well, yeah, did they think Facebook would not automate the process? Did they think Facebook would hire a multi-hundred team of âoenews curatorsâ to keep the monster going?
I know this is a little flippant, but GEEEEZE, what kind of weed were the people smoking! Call these "news curators" a WAAAAAAAABULANCE!
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
We'd better be careful as a society about slowly eroding the value of in-depth, not-yet-trending or popular journalism that creates significant public value, but is hard to recognize while it's being done.
The kind of respected journalism that takes time and effort to research and write, where the journalist/researcher/writer don't have the promise of instant reward, and maybe are facing significant personal risk to find the story that takes down an injustice, powerful person, or entrenched interest.
If you don't watch out diligently, the funneling of our popular consciousness through these most-votes-win, popular-for-today, let's-not-offend-anyone, feel-good-only channels will result in us becoming more and more of a stupidity contest where the fastest, easiest, cheap thrills and sugary taste wins and we have no cultural backbone worth respecting at all.
“When news is as fast as everything else on Facebook, people will naturally read a lot more news,” he said in a Q&A last year, adding that he wants Facebook Instant Articles to be the “primary news experience people have.”
Control
I am not a Trump support and will not be voting for him in any election. However Facebook should stay away from trying to shut him down as the institution.
For one this guy is fueled by hate. So an active attempt to stop him, will just fall under his narrative, sure he will lie if needed, but if there is truth on his side, he will use it to his full advantage.
The problem is silencing such people is only effective for a short time, but their anger will just build up further. It is better to have them out in the public and hopefully get pounced from a strong majority vote, to show that they are not indeed the silent majority, but actually just a vocal minority. The more you can show you are playing by the rules. The more power you have if pointed as unfair.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I don't know that it's even possible for a venue to avoid influencing the discussion. Who you market your "town square" to determines who shows up. How you deal with abusive users matters (and there's always some people who really do need to be kicked out). Whether you focus on small groups of people talking to each other, or whether you hand out microphones; whether there's a stage for people to get up on, and what's the process for letting people onto it, all that stuff can really impact what people hear.
The bigger you are, the more outsiders you'll have who want to do whatever's possible to spread their own messages on your platform, and basically every single policy you make is going to impact who gets heard and who doesn't.
>> former curators described grueling work conditions, humiliating treatment, and a secretive, imperious culture in which they were treated as disposable outsiders
Welcome to work, where "consistency of product" (e.g., the content you crap out) is key. The average salary for a "content curator" appears to be $43K: not bad for a liberal arts major - beats serving coffee, right?
An Indian outlet extensively wrote about flaws in Facebook's Free Basics. Few days later, "Ban [that outlet's name]" was trending on Facebook. Clicking on it, for the first few hours, literally didn't return any relevant result, as nobody was talking about it, and no media outlet had written about it. It was after more than a day or so after this fabricated item kept trending that some other outlets started to write about it.
Emily Kane: Really, Charles. People will think...
Drunk Charles Zuckerberg Kane: ...what I tell them to think!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I am not a Trump support and will not be voting for him in any election. However Facebook should stay away from trying to shut him down as the institution.
For one this guy is fueled by hate.
I'm so tired of this slur. You know who's *really* fueled by hate? Bernie Sanders. His followers' extreme envy of anybody who makes more than minimum wage is true hatred - and you can easily see where it leads with the extreme "protests" that they exhibit.
Do you have ESP?
And I'm out.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
The problem with FB is, as with many other things, that it is so big that few have a non transparent influence on very many. This infleunce is gain by power of greenbuck and this power is gathered by marketing power of FB. One may have less objections if many sizable but not oversized organizations do that. In case FB (or any other big say google or ms or monsanto etc) by using their financial stamina they can overvote you and me. in most of the countries onearth if not in all. So it is a problem and I am not the only one that sees it. The fact is however that not much can be done to resolve it in a reasonable way.
I dunno man. I'm a Bernie supporter because I make six figures and I'm tired of being the main safety net for my friends and relatives. It's a burden on me that I think the government could organize better and more efficiently with my tax dollars than I could...yeah, call efficient government a joke all you want, but it's time consuming as hell to do it myself, and local organized charities don't serve everyone.
Higher minimum wage means a lot more peace of mind for me personally, even though it won't impact my own wages.
I've got pretty good health insurance, but it's an utter travesty that when friends run into medical trouble, they need to open a GoFundMe to survive.
I am wealthy, I support Bernie. Normally I wouldn't bother to state such an uninteresting combination of 2 facts, or with trying to list the various aspects of objective reality that contradict your ridiculous, uninformed and, well, hateful description of a group of 'others' (gee, where have I heard such rhetoric recently?), but you wrote your argument so poorly that this simple statement seems to QED the whole show, so...thanks for saving me some time I guess?
I think maybe you don't know how taxes work, or for that matter percentages.
That will be a lovely sentiment for your Mother's day card on Sunday 'Fuck you, and fuck your cancer. Love, Donald'
Joking aside, it's a lot easier to say "You have a leg infection? Good thing basic medical care is free through my taxes" than "Okay, let's figure out how much that costs and I'll pay it myself, keeping in mind that a doctor will charge you more than they would charge my insurance company in the first place because of negotiated prices".
And both of them are a lot cheaper than "You have a leg infection, and can't pay for it? Well, just wait until it's bad enough that you need to go to the ER, where the hospital will amputate it, pass the much higher cost on to taxpayers or other patients, and remove you from the workforce". That's something I've seen actually happen--and it's one reason why I think I'd still come out ahead by paying higher taxes to help other people out.
This. Facebook is not a place where people are free to say what is on their mind. They are only free to do so as long as the public accepts it.
One cannot freely express their opinions on Facebook if they happen to deviate from what are otherwise considered socially acceptable norms.
While most people appear to be capable of ignoring the views of people that they don't agree with, there are some that... well.... don't. And sometimes it can lead to a person who did nothing more than express an unpopular view no longer even feeling safe.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
And? Stop using Facebook (FB), at least for your news. FB is not the only place to find news on the internet, and its far easier to find news than bothering with FB's trending news swamp of celebrities. I suspect Gizmondo is allowing its own political biases to override the facts here; thank goodness we have innumerable news sources beyond FB and Gizmondo. Use Google Search.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Most of everyone's supporters are uninformed reactionaries who get angry pretty easy and are jealous of whatever they don't have. That's just American politics (okay, all politics). It's easy to say "The crazies in my own group are just a vocal minority, but look how many and how loud they are in everyone else's party!"
Nine times out of ten the better answer is to go to a farm/fish supply store, buy some antibiotics, and handle it yourself.
Does that surprise anybody? The whole thing is a commercial simulation of a real social network, aiming at maximized profits and making all its users (and even additional people that never agreed to anything) their product.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I live in a society where we have guaranteed medical care for everyone. I am also a relatively high income earner and my effective tax rate doesn't exceed 30%.
There is a difference between Anger and Hate.
Sanders is not saying get rid of the Millionaires, but make sure they are playing on fairer ground, and the fact that they seem to have extra advantages, causes anger. However he is not touting kicking out the Millionaires.
Trump on the other hand is campaigning on kicking out people and excluding people not because of any rational slight, but because these people are different and scary.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
This is perhaps the thing that outsiders looking at the US find the hardest to understand. Universal health car is a given in every other first world country.
When I travelled the US back in 2008 I stayed at a B&B in Nakatosh, LA. The owner of the B&B had a mate of his working there in exchange for free accommodation and a little bit of money because his mate had a growth in his elbow that prevented him from working as a carpenter and was too expensive for him to get sorted. He was madly trying to save / scrape up the cash to get it sorted but he estimated it was another year before he could.
Sure if he had had more savings he could have been ok. But medical costs can be insane. So here I was looking at a guy in his 40s, with a skill that people use, that is stuck on the sidelines. Not only that but the intervention costs would be rising every day, so society had lost a productive member and exchanged it for a drain and was going to pay more to fix it in the future.
A fine way to breed drug resistant bacteria, it's so lovely that you're sharing this excellent way of reducing global life expectancy and promoting a return to the medical outcomes so familiar at the start of the last century.
From what I see on my facebook wall
This is your bellwether for sociological conclusions? Most people at least pretend they are informing their arguments in less idiotic ways but, again, thank you for making this time-efficient for me.
1) really bad with math and 2) really naive about government. I could also throw in 3) never heard of Venezuela
Please. That is some weak-ass strawman shit. I might be tempted to actually respond to these if they weren't so painfully facile. Are you (and all Trump supporters) that guy screaming 'go to fucking Auschwitz!' outside a Trump rally? No? Then do me a favor and try to hold that thought and the transitive property in your head at the same time the next time you read Facebook. Also, it sounds like your friends are idiots. Maybe it is time to reflect on that.
but I'd be a dick at that point
First true statement you have made so far.
Most of Bernie's supporters are the standard left-wingers who are envious of anybody who's "made it".
'Most of Trump's supporters are the standard right-wingers who are envious of the fun-loving lifestyle and hot girlfriends of anybody who's "not an utter twat"'. See how that works? I encourage you to talk to some real people, because you are describing cartoon characters.
If you think they won't turn on you in a heartbeat you're even more naive than I'm assuming above.
Or, maybe, just maybe, people aren't all 1 dimensional characters from the sad puppet show that is your mind. Perhaps it is not wealth but overwhelming dicketry backed by by the power of wealth that people have a problem with. When you call certain people 'liberal elites', is this an expression of envy? Do you hate them for one reason and one reason alone - that they are richer and smarter than you? Or is it that you disagree with their politics, that it irks you that their elite nature allows them disproportionate influence, and you wish there were a more egalitarian system of representation that did not allow such a thing? Funny - that sounds familiar.
Seriously, man. Try harder. This is just sad.
Some of us read at -1. We see all the posts.
227-3517
If you're not a retard, you're doing no more harm than a doctor prescribing the same exact drug. You're likely doing less harm if you're actually dosing yourself properly based on body weight. A typical formulary has 1, maybe 2 strengths available, and your doctor picks one and a pill count/frequency based on your body weight to kinda of match.
In most cases doctors guess at an infection and treat with a wide spectrum antibiotic. If it responds, great. If not, switch antibiotics.
Sometimes they do a lab culture to find out what it is. Yet never in my life have I had to wait for a lab result to be given a prescription for an antibiotic or antiviral.
don't forget to click the load all comments button. For some reason, even with a low (~50) number of posts, not all show up.
If you're not a retard, you're doing no more harm than a doctor prescribing the same exact drug.
You've skipped the part where the doctor would determine first that antibiotics are the appropriate response.
Of course, I'm skipping the part where some doctors are retards handing out antibiotics like candy where it wont add any benefit except a small placebo effect and a large contribution to the doctor's profits.
I don't know that it's even possible for a venue to avoid influencing the discussion. Who you market your "town square" to determines who shows up. How you deal with abusive users matters (and there's always some people who really do need to be kicked out).
Facebook is a social network. They don't need to curate, they can let the users do that for themselves. That there's anybody deciding what is "trending" is ridiculous.
Do you mean Natchitoches?
There are more than a few of us and I'm actually a Libertarian. I am not a Randian but I am a Libertarian. In fact, I've been with the party since about 1978. One of the many reasons I support Sanders is because his policies will be less expensive, overall, for the entirety.
Of course, there's a good chance that you don't know many Libertarians and have a crazy belief about the things most of us stand for. Though, to be fair, we do have some idiots in the party. I dare say that those idiots are not yet the majority.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Check your settings, all of them. I've been reading Slashdot for a very long time and I check the post count on *every* thread that I read - and load all comments when the number is greater than the set amount (250 here). That has never, not one time, happened in any thread that I've read - in many, many years.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Thats the one. Sorry, phonetic spelling is bad. It used to be the French capital town but then the Mississippi changed course as they pulled the logs out and it got left on a siding.
Why shouldn't what is "trending" be a strictly statistical and or machine learning data driven result with no humans gumming up the works?
Higher minimum wage means a lot more peace of mind for me personally, even though it won't impact my own wages.
Aha, sure. Let's see, we now have to pay the proles more, so it's either we fire a lot of them or we reduce the wages for others in order to have the money to meet the new minimum.
Want a better analogy? Think of the dumbing down of education in order to let the idiots..., erm, intelectually challenged, make grade.
You think driving ad revenue, which is their business model, is ridiculous? Please. Disingenuous, for certain, but far from ridiculous. You think the "trending" feature on Netflix which ALWAYS shows the Netflix original content is accurate? Why would Facebook be any different? They are a business. They are driving ad revenue with the nonsense "trending" tags. the fact that they use it for anything else shouldn't be that surprising considering how vocal Zuckerberg is about his pet projects.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
There are more than a few of us and I'm actually a Libertarian. I am not a Randian but I am a Libertarian. In fact, I've been with the party since about 1978. One of the many reasons I support Sanders is because his policies will be less expensive, overall, for the entirety.
Of course, there's a good chance that you don't know many Libertarians and have a crazy belief about the things most of us stand for. Though, to be fair, we do have some idiots in the party. I dare say that those idiots are not yet the majority.
I am a libertarian (small "l"). Yes, I know the platform. Sanders, at best, is Hugo Chavez, but not so ugly and mean.
Do you have ESP?
I don't know that it's even possible for a venue to avoid influencing the discussion.
It's possible to try. And trying makes a difference.
Doctors rarely determine that. At best, they guess that you need antibiotics and then guess at what kind of infection you have.
I'll say it again: Never in my life have I had to wait for a lab result to get the antibiotics/antivirals. A swab is taken, blood is drawn, or whatever, and I'm given a prescription. I have never heard anything back in my life. Every time I've called to check on the results of the lab tests, they won't tell me. From strep to shingles I only get the runaround. I assume they're never done despite them billing my insurance for it.
Happens to me constantly. Very often, on a new post, it'll say something like--2 posts, 7 hidden... but nothing shows up. I drop my threshold, hit load all comments, everything I can think of, and some show up, but never the amount quoted. Any ideas?
That is odd - it's the literal first thing I check when I scroll down. "Do the numbers match?" So far, they match. I check because I need to know if i have to click to show all. I read at -1 and always have. Come to think of it - that might be a difference. Do you read at -1?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
LOL Well, I'm not going to argue your qualifications as that of Libertarian. It's not up to me to decide what you self-identify as. I would like you to take a few minutes to think about this - if you want. Okay?
The root of the word is "liberty." That is not the same as freedom, by the way. I like to explain it like this - and I ask that you keep in mind that I'm not trying to lecture nor am I hoping to change your mind, okay? If you can do that then this can be constructive for both of us and for others who might read it. I am not preaching, I am not asserting that I'm sure I'm correct, I'm simply sharing what I believe.
Liberty, the root of Libertarian (note the capitalization) is important. To put this into easy to understand words:
You are free to kill me. You are not at liberty to do so. If I am trying to kill you, you have a right to kill me.
Sanders is not Chavez. Sanders is akin to the European "Socialist Democrat." Yes, he has some policies that I disagree with. But, he's the closest one to the policies that I do agree with so it's in my interest to vote for him. No, he won't be of great help for me - in fact, he'll make me pay more money (assuming I don't just want to avoid the taxes - that's easier done than most think.)
Keep in mind that he'll have NO support from the Democrats or the Republicans. That's not a bad thing - it means he'll be really limited in what he's able to accomplish.
See, the best thing we can hope for is to give everyone the liberty to maximize their enjoyments of their freedoms. Freedoms are only taken by force, by the way. I'm literally free to shoot you. There's nothing stopping me. There will be consequences but I am free to do so.
Let's see how you take that and we'll see if we can go from here. Keep in mind, I'm not offering or trying to change your views. I'm merely explaining my position. I'm merely justifying, giving the reasoning and logic behind it, the expressed ideals that I have shared. You're free to disagree, agree, or posit your own views. I have no interest in silencing you. I do have a vested interest in ensuring that you're given all the information that I have access to in order to make your own choices. It's good to be able to have varied views.
On thing I will mention is that zealotry is never acceptable - extremism is not going to work. If you're a party to any such things we can simply stop the discourse immediately and save us both some time. To that, I add that Sanders is, by no means, an unrealistic zealot.
If you do get a minute, I'd ask that you take some time to research some of the math involved. One of the primary reasons that I support Sanders is that, in all likelihood, it will end up being less expensive OVERALL after a period of about 5 years. It will, without a doubt, be more expensive at first. It will take a generation to reach full fruition and we need to be able to accept that there's going to be further refinements made as time progresses. I think it's an excellent starting position but not a very good end-point.
What say you, is this a meaningful discussion or is it just idle banter on Slashdot best suited for throwing shit and calling each other names? That is entirely up to you. I'm quite receptive to either. I'm as much a monkey as anyone and slinging poop suits me just fine.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
If somebody paid for a "trending" spot, then it should be labeled as sponsored. That's probably a legal requirement under current FCC regulations, at least in the United States.
For anything else, it may not be surprising that they fuck with stuff, but their isn't any justification other than that they're fucks.