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.

Comments

Biased

[mwvdlee]

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

Re:Biased

[mfearby]

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.

Re:Biased

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Biased

[Opportunist]

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.

Re:Biased

[Karl Cocknozzle]

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.

Re:Biased

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:Biased

[Opportunist]

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.

Re:Biased

[Kiuas]

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,

Time to apply antitrust on FB

[Anonymous Coward]

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

They just blatantly censored a critic

[MikeRT]

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).

Re:FB as news source

[Feyshtey]

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.

Why?

[Fuzi719]

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.