Senate GOP Launches Inquiry Into Facebook's News Curation (gizmodo.com)

Michael Nunez, reporting for Gizmodo: The US Senate Commerce Committee -- which has jurisdiction over media issues, consumer protection issues, and internet communication -- has sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg requesting answers to questions it has on its trending topics section. The letter comes after Gizmodo on Monday reported on allegations by one former news curator, who worked for Facebook as a contractor, that the curation team routinely suppressed or blacklisted topics of interest to conservatives. That report also included allegations from several former curators that they used an "injection tool" to add or bump stories onto the trending module. The letter asks that Facebook "arrange for your staff including employees responsible for trending topics to brief committee staff on this issue." The letter was signed by Chairman for the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Senator John Thune (R) from South Dakota.

Comments

Re:There is a difference

[amicusNYCL]

On a site that is supposed to represent the curation of your interests and friends

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA no, Facebook is supposed to represent the accumulation of all of your data, which they sell to anyone offering money. That's all they've ever been. The only reason they care whether you clicked on a story is so that they can add that data point to their database, show the same story to your friends to see if they can get those people to click on it also, and then sell that data to an advertiser. If you think they're doing anything else then you're delusional (yes I know your post history, so that assertion might be redundant).

The reason why Facebook has a market cap of over $340 billion is not because their users pay them. The people who sign on and click on news stories are not their customers, those people are the product that Facebook delivers.