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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.

31 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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    Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
    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 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.

      --
      Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
    5. 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.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    6. 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.

      --
      Who did what now?
    7. Re:Biased by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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:

      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."

      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.'"
    8. 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.
    9. Re:Biased by Kiuas · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      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
    10. Re:Biased by squiggleslash · · Score: 2

      The rest of the media spent the 1990s talking about Clinton's genitalia, promoted Bush as someone you'd have a beer with (no I fucking wouldn't), suppressed criticism of the lead up to the Iraq War (attacking critics as unpatriotic), and refused to drop that policy until late into Bush's presidency, and, by and large, avoided mentioning the dangers of the post-2008 Republican melt-down because they're too scared they'll be criticized as "left wing", until the rise of Trump made it impossible to ignore any more.

      And how are they both "far left" and a "mouthpiece for the Democratic party"? The Democrats are a centrist party - why do you think Sanders is being badmouthed by it? The person the Democratic establishment wants to win is friends with Henry Kissenger for fuck's sake.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
    11. Re:Biased by NotDrWho · · Score: 2

      I've not seen anyone forcing straight folk to enter into marriages homosexual folk. Can you say the same for your "side"?

      Well, speaking for myself, I don't have a "side." I hate bible-thumping conservatives every bit as much as SJW hippies.

      What I oppose is ANYONE who wants to restrict my right to speak my mind, or who wants to force me to pay lip service to their cause, or who wants to make their cause above criticism, or who wants to bully and threaten anyone whose only sin is to dare disagree with them. And that's true whether it's a bible-thumper passing some law to make Christianity the official U.S. religion, an SJW trying to enforce "hate speech" laws which make it "hate" to disagree with the SJW agenda, or a Muslim wanting to enforce Sharia law in some suburb of Britain.

      --
      SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
    12. Re:Biased by Opportunist · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.
    13. Re:Biased by west · · Score: 2

      > 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.

      Exactly how many times have *you* personally been admonished for using the wrong pronoun or the like. Not searched for it on the Internet, not heard about it over conversation, but been personally confronted by another human being for something as trivial as this.

      Because if it's not been dozens of times, I suspect that its someone else whose special snowflake feelings have been hurt by the *suggestion* that someone else might disapprove of their speech patterns and now feels oppressed. :-)

      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, but you know, I've never met any of them in real life. And if I did, all it proves is that there are people out there who I'm not willing to spend the effort to accommodate (although I would try if I dealt with them on a regular basis).

      I really don't get this generation of real men (or women I suppose) who are such delicate flowers that their nose is put out of joint by the idea that someone somewhere disapproves of their language and they post about it on Tumbler... Dear God, the horror!

      If you don't want to exercise a level of consideration that is relevant to the people you talk with regularly, well that just makes you a bit of a jerk. However, I'm going to bet that you aren't, and you probably do moderate your language a little so as to not offend the people you actually talk to, even if it costs you a tiny amount of cognitive effort.

      Dear God, the horror! You've turned PC!

    14. 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.
    15. Re:Biased by shawn2772 · · Score: 2

      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.

      Me too. I use slashdot. There's no bias here.

    16. Re:Biased by Opportunist · · Score: 2

      Care to explain why it has to be a fire?

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

      I'm a white male. I am not allowed to tell a black woman that she's wrong.

      Allowed?

      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.

      And I found a video where I was told the moon is a hologram. I did not immediately jump to, "THE MOON IS A HOLOGRAM!"

      You sound a little paranoid, friend. So let me set your mind at ease: You think whatever you want, OK? If an SJW comes up to you on the street and tells you that you are not allowed to think something, you tell them I said it was OK.

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
    18. Re:Biased by desdinova+216 · · Score: 2

      so it's possible, or even probable that extremes on both sides are being filtered but only the right are complaining?

    19. Re:Biased by drainbramage · · Score: 2

      Wait a minute!
      This implies you found a white female that you could tell her when she's wrong, I have a hard time believing you sir.
      As any woman this: If a man speaks in the woods and no woman is around to hear him, is he still wrong?

      --
      No brain, no pain.
  2. FB as news source by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    ... Which is why I don't use Facebook as a source of news ...

    The person who depends on FB as his source of news should depend on a coffee machine as his source of vitamins

    1. Re:FB as news source by cas2000 · · Score: 2

      I use facebook as a source of news about friends. And, of course, a valuable source of occasional cat pics without going to the trouble of actually visiting a cat pic site.

      and what's so wrong with vitamin C anyway?

      ps: I use userscripts to make FB less annoying, including setting `display: none` on Suggestions and other spam, "Trending" bullshit, etc. I also use a separate browser (midori) for FB and only FB so that my other browsers don't have to run FB spyware scripts and web-bugs.

    2. 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.

      --
      "But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
  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.

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  5. Like always... by Cantankerous+Cur · · Score: 2, Funny

    Reality has a well-known liberal bias.

    1. Re:Like always... by tom229 · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

      --
      If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
  6. They just blatantly censored a critic by MikeRT · · Score: 4, Informative

    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).

  7. 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.

  8. What? by s.petry · · Score: 2

    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.

  9. 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.