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Facebook Says Humans Won't Write Its Trending Topic Descriptions Anymore (recode.net)
Following a former Facebook journalist's report that the company's workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network's Trending Topics section, the company has been in damage control mode. First, the company announced it would tweak its Trending Topics section and revamp how editors find trending stories. Specifically, they will train the human editors who work on Facebook's trending section and abandon several automated tools it used to find and categorize trending news in the past. Most recently, Facebook added political scenarios to its orientation training following the concerns. Now, it appears that Facebook will "end its practice of writing editorial descriptions for topics, replacing them with snippets of text pulled from news stories." Kurt Wagner, writing for Recode: It's been more than three months since Gizmodo first published a story claiming Facebook's human editors were suppressing conservative news content on the site's Trending Topics section. Facebook vehemently denied the report, but has been dealing with the story's aftermath ever since. On Friday, Facebook announced another small but notable change to Trending Topics: Human editors will no longer write the short story descriptions that accompany a trending topic on the site. Instead, Facebook is going to use algorithms to "pull excerpts directly from stories." It is not, however, cutting out humans entirely. In fact, Facebook employees will still select which stories ultimately make it into the trending section. An algorithm will surface popular stories, but Facebook editors will weed out the inappropriate or fake ones. "There are still people involved in this process to ensure that the topics that appear in Trending remain high-quality," the company's blog reads.
progressives did. it's Friday. that's all i've got.
That's largely because being a conservative these days largely seems to involve being mad about something.
Get that idea from Facebook trending stories?
The real difference between the USSR's Pravda and the Murdoch/Disney media is that most Russian People were smart enough to know they were being brain washed, and admitted it when needed. People like you on the other hand..
Shows like "The Daily Show", which for years were a better source for an unbiased perspective, are today have turned purely biased. Stewart was left leaning too, especially on things like the 2nd Amendment, but at least it was not the full open bias we have today. He offered the countering position and occasionally made fun of the lefts mistakes in the process. The current media tells you openly that Hillary "deserves" to be President and that the competition is an Ad Hominem of their choosing (without facts to back their position in most cases). This is such an open bias that you should question the Hegelian dialectic on other stations with the same owners. That same media also happen to claim that any opposing positions to the Progressive Left is "angry", "baseless", "Conspiracy", "Outrageous", "Unjust", "bigoted", "Racist", and anything else which can be leveraged to silence opposition. And you believe them? Shame on you. Or perhaps you get paid to make such asinine claims, in which case Shame on YOU!
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
The only bias I see is that for some reason, Facebook seems to think I'm in any way interested in celebrity gossip, because that's about all that ever shows up in the "Trending" section for me.
I'm interested in science and technology, but every "trending" topic I seem to see is something about what Britney Spears ate for breakfast, or whose dress Catelyn Jenner wore to the mall, or some other equally banal and useless piece of "news" about some celebrity that I don't give a crap about.
I'm not even exaggerating. My current "trending" topics include:
As you can see, my "trending" doesn't have a Liberal or Conservative slant -- it just has a inanely stupid slant.
"Trending" is the least useful part of Facebook, and personally I wish they'd just get rid of it altogether.
Yaz