![]() ![]() These guidelines do not prohibit any news outlet from appearing in Trending Topics."īeyond red versus blue, curators were trained to "inject" select stories into the trending module even when they weren't trending, according to sources quoted by Gizmodo. Nor do they permit the prioritization of one viewpoint over another or one news outlet over another. These guidelines do not permit the suppression of political perspectives. There are rigorous guidelines in place for the review team to ensure consistency and neutrality. "Trending Topics shows you the popular topics and hashtags that are being talked about on Facebook. "Facebook is a platform for people and perspectives from across the political spectrum," a Facebook spokesperson told CBS News. However, Facebook says it does not suppress political views and has guidelines in place to keep the system from being improperly manipulated. Last week, Gizmodo reported that Facebook's trending news team is primarily run by 20- and 30-somethings who graduated from Ivy League and private East Coast schools. And as a social network with a newsfeed of vacation pictures, Facebook could get away with being secretive about their curation.Īs the most powerful publisher and now editor in the world today, Facebook owes it to its billion users to be clear about how the site plans on distributing news.The omissions were the result of curators' personal news judgment, not any mandated policy from Facebook, the source told Gizmodo. If there’s one thing Silicon Valley loves more than the conceit of an amoral algorithm, it is secrecy. “Just be transparent about how the words on the screen are getting there,” Coglianese said. But Facebook has to be more honest about how it operates as an editor. To turn Facebook’s trending bar into a Reddit page is not the answer. As news websites lose relevance to readers who find content socially, and as stories are published directly onto Facebook as Instant articles, the company’s power will only grow. It’s probably fair to assume that the FTC news was not going as viral as that old condom, but a Facebook employee decided it was more important.įacebook is the dominant player in the media today. Meanwhile my Facebook trending bar has: “Federal Trade Commission: Judge Rules Against Agency’s Bid to Block Health Care Systems Merger”. The front page of Reddit’s ‘”hot” section, an imperfect but useful barometer for the viral stories of the day, currently has headlines like: “Chameleon unsure bug is food or not” and “These condoms are around 60 years old. ![]() Truly viral news content tends to be terrible. “The middle man matters in news consumption,” Coglianese said.įacebook’s in a tricky spot because curation is necessary. It’s scary to think Facebook’s intentionally isolating vast swaths of the country.” “Millions of Facebook users now have no idea that the things they’re concerned about are the concerns of a lot of people. “I wonder what the psychological effects of it are,” said Vince Coglianese, editor of the conservative news site The Daily Caller. When I read suggestions that Facebook might be skewing its trending bar, my first reaction, as a San Francisco liberal, was to be slightly pleased (any help we can get against Trump, right?). The engineers building the products want to skew them toward “quality” content, but it’s hard to determine what quality is, exactly, without making a choice influenced by values. Silicon Valley loves using the word algorithm to cover the word judgment, but any platform built by humans is always political. “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz,” the former news curator told the tech blog Gizmodo. ![]() ![]() It’s just a clever machine, reflecting our desires better and better with every interaction, right? For news producers, we have to believe that the platform treats everyone equally: that it’s a publisher not an editor.Ī conservative whistleblower at Facebook yesterday claimed in a report that the influential “trending news” tab was deliberately biased toward liberal news – something the social network denies. For the site’s billion users, believing there’s no human puppet master behind the scenes makes its growing control over life more palatable. ![]()
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