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Facebook feigns accountability with ‘trusted’ news survey
When Facebook announced it was rolling out a major overhaul to its News Feed earlier this month, it did so with the intention of prioritizing interactions between people over content from publishers. It was a notable shift in strategy for the company, which for the past couple of years had been working closely with news outlets to on heavily promote their articles and videos. But, Facebook discovered that people just weren't happy on the site -- likely due to the vast amount of political flame-throwing they've been exposed to since the 2016 US Presidential election. So in order to alleviate this problem, it decided it was best if users saw more posts from friends and family, instead of news that could have a negative effect on their emotions. Because keeping people both happy and informed is, apparently, hard.
Can we put the fake news genie back in the bottle?
The 2016 presidential campaign has definitively shown us that you shouldn't rely on Facebook for all of your news. Even at its best, you're likely to be exposed primarily to viewpoints and stories you already agree with. Being ensconced in a internet belief bubble takes away a lot of the nuance that exists in the real world -- while that lack of nuance likely helped Donald Trump become the next President of the United States. But beyond the narrow viewpoint that comes from getting news through Facebook is a bigger problem: Fake news has been proliferating on the site at a rapid pace. In August, Facebook made some changes to its "trending news" section, removing human editors and replacing them with an algorithm. Ironically, the move seemed like a response to reports that those human editors were biased against conservative news. Without those editors patrolling the trending section, it became much easier for false stories to slip through. Indeed, a false report about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly being fired spread like wildfire just days after the change was announced.
Humans keep Facebook's trending topics 'relevant'
Facebook's news operation depends on a team of human editors filtering through trending stories surfaced by its news algorithms, internal documents leaked to the Guardian show. The leak comes as the social media giant is denying reports that it suppresses conservative news stories and a Senate committee has expressed concern over Facebook's filtering methods.
Facebook denies filtering conservative news stories
Even if your Facebook News Feed is full of family members dropping racist memes or links to factually inaccurate articles, you might not see such showing up in the "trending news" portion of the social network's landing page. And there's a reason for that: Workers "routinely suppressed" news stories that'd interest conservative users from the section, according to a report from Gizmodo. Those stories apparently include anything about the Conservative Political Action Conference, two-time Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney and posts from conservative news outlet The Drudge Report.
