Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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%.