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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.
You could read it that way. You could also read it as Facebook will stop shitting on links that don't come from a major site:
I did an experiment with fb some years back when it was failing to post most of my political content. If I posted some inane bullshit (I literally used something with "Snooki" in the headline at the time) it would post immediately and stay posted. If I posted something with far-left political content, not only would it often fail to post to begin with, but Facebook would actually remove the URL from the status update later, as in the next day or two, or sometimes weeks later. If I went to my history and manually verified that the content still existed, it did. And meanwhile, my shit canary comment sitting next to it would still be there.
Now, I don't know, maybe they did this to all kinds of content, but in my testing, they were specifically killing left-of-left ultra-liberal content. And it happened again and again.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This is a perfect example of why a one dimensional left/right -divide is utterly useless. I live in a globally very heavily to the left country (Finland) and adhere to many leftist ideas such as the universal health care and education systems we have here, as well as progressive taxation etc...
However, I do not buy into, nor support, any of the SJW crap about forcing people to feel/think/speak a certain way, and I say this as a part of one of the minorities (disabled since birth) that this crowd so often claims to be defending. There are loads of us. If you look at popular anti-SJW youtube chnalles such as Sargon of Akkad who has over 300 000 subscribers and over 74 000 000 views with numerous videos critizing and debunking this SJW thoughtcrime BS, and you take a look at the channel demographics, you'll note that the vast majority (55 %) of his viewership falls into the same category as the man himself (and me as well): a left-leaning libertarian. Ie. people who do not believe in letting the free markets decide over anything and everything, and believe the state serves as an important factor in making sure people's basic needs are met etc, but still at the same time maintain that individuals are free to say what they want, enjoy whatever substances they want etc... The authoritarian left of which you speak of is not just opposed by the right, but by a large quantity of us leftists ourselves, as one of the Sargon videos I linked above well puts it, the modern day SJW crowd has become very similar to the authoritarian right.
So no, there is no one 'The Left' anymore than there is one "The Right". The political field is much wider than that and we should all know that at this point. The political compass is a good tarting point to rid yourself of the tubelike vision that all members of left/right think alike or uniformly, I recommend checking it out if you haven't already,
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
I'm a white male. I am not allowed to tell a black woman that she's wrong. Even if she is. Else I may at best choose whether I'd want to be misogynistic first and then racist or whether I want to be berated about being racist first.
Just recently I discovered a masterpiece of a video where I was told that even THINKING that I could possibly be right when disagreeing with said black woman is already a no-go. Which strikes me a lot like the Christian tenet where "wanting to sin" is already a sin...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.