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Facebook Is Tweaking Trending Topics To Counter Charges of Bias (recode.net)
An anonymous reader writes: Facebook has said once again in an open letter to Sen. John Thune, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, that its Trending Topics section is free of any political bias or manipulation. But in response to Gizmodo's report that Facebook employees were suppressing conservative news stories, Facebook is revamping how editors find trending stories. "We could not fully exclude the possibility of isolated improper actions or unintentional bias in the implementation of our guidelines or policies," Facebook general Counsel Colin Stretch wrote. Of course, Facebook is going to train the human editors who work on their trending section; they're also going to abandon several automated tools it used to find and categorize trending news in the past. Recode provides some examples, writing, "[Facebook] will no longer use its "1K list," a group of 1,000 websites it used to help verify headlines." Facebook will also get rid of several top publications, including the New York Times and CNN.
So in summary, Facebook is going to become biased in order to prevent being labeled as biased.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
impartiality long ago with their support of Hillary and the entire "security inquiry" BS.
Hell with Facebook, seriously. There's more important shit going on.
Thepiratebay.se is down! It redirects to a useless thepiratebay.org CloudFlare backup. Of course nothing I try to search for is available that way, so why the fuck CloudFlare wastes their time and bandwidth to show me that page is among the mysteries of life. It doesn't matter what proxy in what country I use - that's evaded this bullshit in the past but isn't cutting the mustard now.
If I had my druthers, Facebook would be down and out and Thepiratebay.se would be working and the whole world would be better for it. Wtf happened to the "most resilient torrent site" this time?? Why is there no news about it?
CNN is all about making money. I thought they were going to rid themselves of socialist bias.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
All your bias belong to us!
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
How absurd.
That's probably what the Jews said when Hitler was campaigning on making Germany great again.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Facebook should just embrace its political bias, instead of hiding it.
I look forward to not seeing any differences on my nonexistent Facebook feed.
The person who depends on FB as his source of news should depend on a coffee machine as his source of vitamins
n/t
FB has become too big and too powerful, and their arrogance is increasingly as well
Witness their reply
They can go "unintentional" all fucking day long and I still ain't gonna buy their motherfucking lie
Those fuckers have become so blatantly arrogant it is time to break FB into seperate companies, like what the court did to Standard Oil
http://thehill.com/policy/technology/280548-glenn-beck-facebook-meeting-felt-like-the-salem-witch-trial
“I looked around the room; I heard the complaints; I listened to the perspectives, and not a single person in the room shared evidence of any wrongdoing,” he said. “Maybe they had some, but it wasn’t shared.”
For our public broadcasting network. The two major parties of the country pretty much hijacked it and held it occupied. And it had to be "unbiased". Which of course didn't mean that it can report whatever it wants, it meant that it had to report about the two parties equally. If there was a story about party A, they had to include one about party B. Even if there was nothing going on at party B at that moment. Which led to quite ridiculous headline news reports about some unknown party A backbencher visiting a retirement home or something, because something noteworthy actually happened with party B.
And of course this "unbiased" reporting didn't mean that you had to hear at all from any other parties...
We eventually found out that this kind of reporting is ridiculous. Hope you come to that conclusion soon, too.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
Lauren Southern got censored for posting critical posts on Facebook about censorship on Facebook. There are plenty of more troubling cases like content being deemed a violation of community standards and deleted.
Of course it also doesn't help that Facebook is in the same industry as Twitter and Twitter doesn't even bother to hide their bias (ex: their new "council" is entirely SJW organizations, not even mainstream liberal; they've also been caught shadow banning people for political bias).
It is quite amusing that Facebook is trying to pretend to be a source of unbiased news. I heard this story and thought, what kind of halfwit would expect even the pretense of unbiased news from Facebook? This sounds like a planted story where Facebook plants the expectation of being a neutral, unbiased source of news, and there's great rending of garments and theater when discovered this may not be the case.
Facebook is a profit-making entity devoted to increasing the fortunes of its top executives and itself. This story is an attempt to create the expectation that Facebook is some kind of source of unbiased news. It certainly can be a news outlet, like any other media outlet, but to suggest it's unbiased is like suggesting Fox or MSNBC is unbiased or any other person or groups of person are unbiased in their reporting.
However, pretending to be unbiased, and then reporting biased stories as unbiased gives one a tremendous amount of political power. Heck, simply being a source of information to people gives the disseminator a great deal of power.
Don't worry. It just means that your anti-vaxxer stories won't show up quite as often, or that 9/11 was an inside job and here's the proof type stuff won't show up so more.
Om, nomnomnom...
it seems they were holding Breitbart and Newsmax to the same standards as other news sources, namely to see a story in more than one news source before calling it trendworthy. Hard to fault that.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Don't worry, you can continue to ignore the credible engineers who contradict the official story and the 'secret' pages in the official report.
You keep making that claim, other people are stating that "trending" should not be manipulated because Facebook has progressive biases. No, it's not the same thing and you are a moron if you keep repeating it.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Fox is not pro-right, and has never been pro-right. They are anti-right as opposed to most other media being pro-left. Fox does not promote liberty, or the 2nd amendment, or fiscal responsibility, or limited Government, or right leaning candidates like Rand or Ron Paul (two easy examples). They were talking about Trump for ratings/money and because he is not from the right.
There is no longer a right leaning media, and has not been since the early 90s when all major outlets were monopolized and canned their journalists. Today all outlets use the AP as their source and hire teleprompter readers instead of journalists.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Branding things as liberal and conservative is a big game in itself because of the identity psychology involved; where people who believe themselves to be a member/consumer of the brand will actually bend themselves into all sorts of hypocrisies in order to maintain their belief.
Everybody wants to believe their brand is the righteous one; their tribe is number 1! It sure is a lot easier than betraying your tribe and switching....especially when there is no tribe and evolved background behavior pattern is not so obvious.
For example, global warming is an issue that was purposely and successfully marketed as an identity issue; forcing conservatives to flip flop from sane positions or be forced to have to question their identity. The best example of this comes from Australia, where a fossil fuel industry campaign admitted to modeling what was done in the USA with great success. Their example is powerful because of the massive turn around they caused on a pretty well established position in a nation seeing early consequences.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
WTF is congress getting involved in what a PRIVATE company is doing? Are they going to investigate Fox News? Or Brietbart? Or Newsmax? So-called "conservatives" can be the most whiny bunch of children in the universe. They spend all their time dictating how people can go to the bathroom or what devices can be shoved up a woman's hoohaa, then whine that the big bad liberals aren't letting them speak.
At least that's what those who paid for advertising in Facebook are doing. Facebook promised them eyeballs, but then goes around and curtails those eyeballs, reneging on their end of the contract, thus making themselves liable to a lawsuit by shortchanged paying customers. The damage is done and the fix kind of doubles down on Facebook opening itself to legal remedies by advertisers.
This, boys and girls, is yet another reason a businessman should keep his politics out of his business.
Why is there any human intervention at all? If this is truly "trending" news then it should make the list solely based on a numbers based algorithm that looks at not only what the major news agencies are reporting but, more importantly, what is being discussed. Facebook keeps track of how many "likes" a story gets and how many Shares it gets and how many comments are posted to any given story.
That should be what determines what is trending. Not some collection of editors. What exactly are they going to "train" these people to do? Train them to artificially promote conservative news stories to tamp down the current outcry? What happens when that goes too far and liberals start complaining about it? More training? Lather rinse repeat. Nothing more than window dressing. Is this supposed to be like the SCOTUS where you have x number of conservatives and x number of liberals and everything is supposed to balance out? How about just letting news stories "trend" on their own merits?
" will also get rid of several top publications, including the New York Times and CNN"
Great. The two organizations, flawed as they may be, that actually have reporters who work on location are the ones getting the boot? Who's left, Drudge, Red State, Michael Moore, Greenpeace?
Thanks, Facebook, but I'll personally be trending toward birthday parties and friends' gigs. Oh, and the cats, the never-ending supply of cats.
Look, anybody who uses FB as their primary source of news should be publicly ridiculed. It is an amalgamation, like Slashdot. A secondary source (at best) with public commentary. What is truly disappointing is how some *actual* news shows use FB trending topics as a source of their news. Which is almost as bad as virtual man-on-the-street segments where somebody from CNN or Fox News actually reads random twitter posts. Seriously? Is this what has become of our beloved first amendment right to free press? Now we have news shows trying to be social, and social networks trying to be news sources. What's next, people taking the Daily Show "reporters" at face value? Oh wait, they already do (I'm looking at you, HuffPo and the Blaze).
Read No One Left To Lie To by Christopher Hitchens. If you prefer the Clintons to Trump knock yourself out.
Exactly how many times have *you* personally been admonished for using the wrong pronoun or the like.
I have personally been admonished once that I can remember in the past year, for having used "tranny" when "trans" was appropriate. But I have read about situations in which being admonished once is enough to get fired.
PC is essentially consideration. Sure, there are some people whose needs are so out there that I probably won't afford them the consideration they would like
Perhaps some of the anti-PCers have seen the euphemism treadmill run long enough that they look at the history of "no, it's handicapped; no, it's disabled; no, it's physically challenged; no, it's differently abled; no, person first, it's person with a disability" and conclude that their "needs are so out there".
AKA the Argument to moderation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
FYI the truth doesn't always lie in the middle it is possible that one side is telling the whole truth and the other side has chosen a self-serving lie. Happens much more often than you would think. Be forewarned.
The key here is to simply be transparent about the automated chain, and somehow transparent with the editing biases. Every editor has a bias - I can forgive the bias as long as they are honest about it. The last piece is simply to stop suppressing stories that people try to share with each other. Yes, this happens on Facebook a LOT.
Facebook, a non-governmental corporation, can't influence its trending items in a liberal fashion but it's OK for Fox News to continually spout the conservative company line.
Just checking.
Zuck must read slashdot, he pretty much took my advice:
https://politics.slashdot.org/...
Table-ized A.I.
When a line in a news story reads, "going to train the human editors".