Facebook Disputes Gizmodo Report, Says It Never Built and Withheld Any News Feed Changes Based on Their Political Impact (slate.com)

Tech news site Gizmodo reported Monday that Facebook planned a News Feed update that would have identified fake or hoax news stories, but "disproportionately impacted right-wing news sites by downgrading or removing that content from people's feeds" so it chose to never release the update. Facebook has denied the claims in the report. A spokesperson told Slate: "The article's allegation is not true. We did not build and withhold any News Feed changes based on their potential impact on any one political party. We always work to make News Feed more meaningful and informative, and that includes examining the quality and accuracy of items shared, such as clickbait, spam, and hoaxes. Mark himself said, "I want to do everything I can to make sure our teams uphold the integrity of our products." This includes continuously review updates (sic) to make sure we are not exhibiting unconscious bias.

Comments

A/B Testing

[darkain]

BULLSHIT Facebook. My account was shoved into the A/B testing for this several months ago. Articles from known satirical web sites would be flagged as such, and this was such a praised feature at the time, too. We all got sick and fucking tired having to constantly link to Snopes or other resources to "prove" that a particular site was a satire site. The only real issue is that this system was primarily limited to just domains as a whole, so bullshit clickbaitery web sites that have marginal content once in a blue moon wouldn't be listed (Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, and similar)