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Facebook Is Tweaking Trending Topics To Counter Charges of Bias (recode.net)

Posted by BeauHD on from the nothing-to-see-here dept.

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.

18 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. Biased by mwvdlee · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So in summary, Facebook is going to become biased in order to prevent being labeled as biased.

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    1. Re:Biased by mfearby · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Which is why I don't use Facebook as a source of news. I only use it to keep in touch with people I know, and ignore the rest of whatever else it offers.

    2. Re:Biased by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yup, that's pretty much what everyone uses it for. Check out what your friends are doing/baby pictures/cat pictures, ignore everything else.

      Twitter is where everything is, if you're into Twitter.

      Nobody bothers, or cares about most online publications as a whole, but piecemeal they are still considered primary sources of news, and unlike facebook, Twitter doesn't promote articles, it promotes "trending hashtags" and that is an entirely human driven mechanic. Twitter's platform is also a lot harder to manipulate with sockpuppet accounts.

      Facebook's "verification" is what ultimately harms it, same with google+ and various "real name policies" like that used for HuffPo, CBC.ca and such. All it does it discourage posting on controversial topics and just comment on local news instead.

    3. Re:Biased by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      as opposed to left wing fascist who want to force their silly social "justice" religion on others

    4. Re:Biased by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 1, Insightful

      The entertaining part about all of this is that a political party that is fighting for private organizations to deny groups service based on "religious" preference is now complaining that a private organization is denying groups "equal time" based on political preference.

    5. Re:Biased by EzInKy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I've not seen anyone forcing straight folk to enter into marriages homosexual folk. Can you say the same for your "side"? It's either you marry the opposite sex or you don't marry at all.

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      Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
    6. Re:Biased by EzInKy · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Nobody on the left wants to force straights that want to marry to marry homosexuals, but everyone on the right wants to force homosexuals that want to marry to marry straights. It is only the "conservatives" who are trying to force people to follow rules, liberals believe in allowing people to follow their own hearts.

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      Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
    7. Re:Biased by Opportunist · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Unfortunately that's not right. The left does actually NOT say "mind your own fucking business". It says "I tell you what fucking business you should mind!" and more important "I also tell you what business you MUST NOT mind".

      And that's where I had to detach myself from being "left". I do not feel that I have the right to tell people what they are allowed to fucking THINK.

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      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    8. Re:Biased by Karl+Cocknozzle · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I don't know what "left" you were a part of, but I've never in my life wanted (or intended) to control how anybody thinks. Be as prejudiced as you like! But god so help you if you attempt to act on your prejudice, say by enacting laws to enshrine that prejudice into statutes that we all have to follow. Then I will come down on you like the hammer of Thor.

      So: Think, whatever you want. Be as prejudiced and hateful as you like! But if you choose to act on that, yeah, I've got a huge problem with that.

      Thoughts don't really matter. Actions? They matter.

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      Who did what now?
    9. Re:Biased by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm not really a friend of that false "left-right" dichotomy. "You're left? So you're a commie!" No. For the same reason that someone who's right leaning isn't a Fascist.

      What I despise is those "new left", that's about as despicable as the "new right" we had a while ago now, that emerged, which are religiously fanatic do-gooders. PC-bullshit spewing, safe-space needing special snowflakes that come up with solutions trying to find a problem. Who ensure that you can't tell no joke anymore because someone, somewhere could maybe somehow be offended by it.

      "What's the opposite of Christopher Reeves?"
      "Christopher Walken"

      But you can't tell that! That's offensive! To cripples. No, wait, you can't say that word anymore either. They're disabled. No, wait, they're not, they're "differently able" now. Or maybe they are not anymore and we have a new bullshit word now for it, sorry, I don't really waste my time keeping up with bullshit.

      Fuck that. And the PC snowflakes while we're at it.

      That's what I'm talking about. These bullshitters are not about "mind your own buisiness", they are EXACTLY the same ilk as the other religious idiots from the right side of the spectrum trying to dictate what I may or may not say, think or do, not based on some real requirements for coexistence. One take their moral high ground from the whims of their imaginary buddy, one from the imagined "offense" someone MIGHT feel when he's told that reality doesn't conform to his (or her, their, hir or whatever fucked up mangled pronoun is now correct to use so I don't "oppress" someone by assuming his, her, its, whatevershit's gender) whims.

      Fuck them both. Lock them in a room and hand them enough ammo to shoot each other.

      Whoever loses
      We win.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    10. Re:Biased by Opportunist · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Wow, watch the battle of the mods. Someone seems to have stirred the SJW army.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  2. Re: Good. New York Times and CNN gave-up... by EzInKy · · Score: 1, Insightful

    That's probably what the Jews said when Hitler was campaigning on making Germany great again.

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    Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
  3. Time to apply antitrust on FB by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    FB has become too big and too powerful, and their arrogance is increasingly as well

    Witness their reply

    ... We could not fully exclude the possibility of isolated improper actions or unintentional bias

    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

  4. We actually had something like that by Opportunist · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

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    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  5. An obligation to be unbiased? by Beeftopia · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:FB as news source by Feyshtey · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Unfortunately it seems an appreciable number of US youth do get their political information from FB, Twitter and other such apps. They get a snarky 200-ish character post about an important issue and act as if they are actually informed. What's worse, they act on it with passion, and charge off to the voting booth or a protest or a boycott.

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    "But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
  7. Re:Like always... by tom229 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Wow. The level of arrogance in that statement is astounding.

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    If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
  8. Why? by Fuzi719 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.