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Facebook Is Tweaking Trending Topics To Counter Charges of Bias (recode.net) 157

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.
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Facebook Is Tweaking Trending Topics To Counter Charges of Bias

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  • Biased (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mwvdlee ( 775178 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @02:08AM (#52169629) Homepage

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

    • Re:Biased (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mfearby ( 1653 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @02:13AM (#52169641) Homepage

      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 (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @02:46AM (#52169699)

        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.

        • I've taken a look at some hashtag-aggregation site that tries to figure out "hashtrends".

          And ignoring local trends, the only thing the US is currently seemingly interested is some kind of bachelorette. I don't know what it is, but I cannot really get myself to think that this is in any way relevant...

      • by Anonymous Coward

        ... Which is why I don't use Facebook as a source of news ...

        The person who depends on FB as his source of news should depend on a coffee machine as his source of vitamins

        • by cas2000 ( 148703 )

          I use facebook as a source of news about friends. And, of course, a valuable source of occasional cat pics without going to the trouble of actually visiting a cat pic site.

          and what's so wrong with vitamin C anyway?

          ps: I use userscripts to make FB less annoying, including setting `display: none` on Suggestions and other spam, "Trending" bullshit, etc. I also use a separate browser (midori) for FB and only FB so that my other browsers don't have to run FB spyware scripts and web-bugs.

        • by Feyshtey ( 1523799 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @07:09AM (#52170299)
          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.
      • Exactly.... only thing is why this senator is not raking Faux (errr...Fox) News over the coals for their "Fair & Balanced" news reporting?

      • 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.

        Me too. I use slashdot. There's no bias here.

      • 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.

        Could someone please inform our lawmakers of this fact? Apparently they are under the illusion that they need to step in and mandate a neutral stance within a damn social media network in order to ensure that all parties are getting their fair share of shit slinging, which is the phase of the election we've now reached. Heaven forbid the shit slinging is slanted for the masses.

        I seriously cannot believe our lawmakers are involved in this. Makes me wonder how they would have attacked AOL when keywords wer

    • All this fuss about "Trending" on Facebook... Am I the only one who's never even seen this thing. It doesn't show up on my FB page. I googled it, just to see what it is, but it doesn't show up where it's supposed to be.

      • It might depend on how you view it. I've seen it on desktop browsers but not on mobile browsers. On desktop browsers it might be something that can be suppressed with plugins/extensions.

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      The entertaining part about all of this is that a political party that is fighting for private organizations to deny groups service based on "religious" preference is now complaining that a private organization is denying groups "equal time" based on political preference.

    • by cas2000 ( 148703 )

      Obviously, there's good bias and bad bias.

      Fox News, being 100% biased toward extremist right-wing nutbaggery, is allowed to be as biased as they like. This is good bias.

      Facebook weren't always biased towards that, they let some lefty-sounding things though sometimes, so that's automatically bad bias. Shame on them.

      Of course, the difference is that they're both privately owned media/publishing businesses. That crucial difference is why it's OK for Fox to be biased but not Facebook. Shame on those damn co

      • Fox is not pro-right, and has never been pro-right. They are anti-right as opposed to most other media being pro-left. Fox does not promote liberty, or the 2nd amendment, or fiscal responsibility, or limited Government, or right leaning candidates like Rand or Ron Paul (two easy examples). They were talking about Trump for ratings/money and because he is not from the right.

        There is no longer a right leaning media, and has not been since the early 90s when all major outlets were monopolized and canned the

        • Using your definition of "right", there hasn't been a major party on the right since 1980.

          • by s.petry ( 762400 )

            That is correct in a general sense, but I'd say that the actual loss of the right was in the 60s. Kennedy was "right" and you see where that landed, his VP was left as soon as he swore in. Ross Perot was right, but he lost the primary due to several criminal actions by the Bush Campaign. Ron Paul was right, but he similarly lost the primary due to various activities by both the Media and Republican party.

            Controlled opposition is not some new idea, it's been out there for centuries.

      • You're a fundamentally stupid person. The conservative position is that privately funded news outlets are ALLOWED to be biased, but it's OK for people to point out that a specific source is biased, and so everyone should take that source with a grain of salt.

        Facebook is saying, in essence, "We used to be biased, but we made changes and so should be taken with fewer grains of salt.

    • Re:Biased (Score:5, Interesting)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @06:18AM (#52170117) Homepage Journal

      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.

      • so it's possible, or even probable that extremes on both sides are being filtered but only the right are complaining?
    • Exactly. Like the iPod shuffle can't be too random or it annoys people because it isn't random enough.

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

      And now that they have facebook on the run, they won't stop until they only reference Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.

      Cave baby, cave!

    • Bias? I feel they are biased in terms of "quality" of "what is news." My news feed always contains (to me -- stupid) Entertainment news "Celebrity caught walking their dog" or "Person paints house lime green" "Trump says Fox news anchor has two headed baby" Stuff that I wouldn't consider news. Tabloid "National Enquirer" stuff yes. But news...no.

      Is there a conservative version of The Enquirer?

  • by Anonymous Coward

    impartiality long ago with their support of Hillary and the entire "security inquiry" BS.

    • No. All they do is lie about Hillary. They hate her. Why do you think they give so much free advertising to tRump?

    • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @04:14AM (#52169871)

      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

  • CNN is all about making money. I thought they were going to rid themselves of socialist bias.

  • All your bias belong to us!

  • by Anonymous Coward

    I look forward to not seeing any differences on my nonexistent Facebook feed.

  • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @05:01AM (#52169937)

    For our public broadcasting network. The two major parties of the country pretty much hijacked it and held it occupied. And it had to be "unbiased". Which of course didn't mean that it can report whatever it wants, it meant that it had to report about the two parties equally. If there was a story about party A, they had to include one about party B. Even if there was nothing going on at party B at that moment. Which led to quite ridiculous headline news reports about some unknown party A backbencher visiting a retirement home or something, because something noteworthy actually happened with party B.

    And of course this "unbiased" reporting didn't mean that you had to hear at all from any other parties...

    We eventually found out that this kind of reporting is ridiculous. Hope you come to that conclusion soon, too.

    • by tomhath ( 637240 )

      NPR has always been controlled by the Democrats. It was set up by Congress and Lyndon Johnson back in the 1960's to deliver their message; management and editors name their own replacements to ensure the legacy continues.

      The dust-up a few years ago wasn't about equal time, it was about very biased opinion pieces by people like Bill Moyers and Daniel Shore.

      • Well, I'm glad they don't get to set the laws 'round over here. Not that our politicians are great, but frankly, your system sucks even worse.

    • by tom229 ( 1640685 )
      Reporting unbiased news is remarkably different than providing equal air time for two arguing political parties. A public broadcasting network should know this better than anyone, or they've really lost their way.
  • by Cantankerous Cur ( 3435207 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @05:52AM (#52170049)
    Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
    • Re:Like always... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by tom229 ( 1640685 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @08:01AM (#52170517)
      Wow. The level of arrogance in that statement is astounding.
      • Branding things as liberal and conservative is a big game in itself because of the identity psychology involved; where people who believe themselves to be a member/consumer of the brand will actually bend themselves into all sorts of hypocrisies in order to maintain their belief.

        Everybody wants to believe their brand is the righteous one; their tribe is number 1! It sure is a lot easier than betraying your tribe and switching....especially when there is no tribe and evolved background behavior pattern is n

        • You're certainly onto something, but there's another factor at work: at the grassroots level, the US political right is perhaps the least intelligent, most willfully-ignorant mass of humanity to exist in a First World nation. These are people who are truly committed to the idea that if they believe it, it must be so.

      • "Wow. The level of accuracy in that statement is astounding."

        There...fixed that for you!

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @06:00AM (#52170073)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by Beeftopia ( 1846720 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @06:18AM (#52170119)

    It is quite amusing that Facebook is trying to pretend to be a source of unbiased news. I heard this story and thought, what kind of halfwit would expect even the pretense of unbiased news from Facebook? This sounds like a planted story where Facebook plants the expectation of being a neutral, unbiased source of news, and there's great rending of garments and theater when discovered this may not be the case.

    Facebook is a profit-making entity devoted to increasing the fortunes of its top executives and itself. This story is an attempt to create the expectation that Facebook is some kind of source of unbiased news. It certainly can be a news outlet, like any other media outlet, but to suggest it's unbiased is like suggesting Fox or MSNBC is unbiased or any other person or groups of person are unbiased in their reporting.

    However, pretending to be unbiased, and then reporting biased stories as unbiased gives one a tremendous amount of political power. Heck, simply being a source of information to people gives the disseminator a great deal of power.

    • by swb ( 14022 )

      I think the real pressure is coming from major news organizations like the New York Times. Since this story has bubbled up, they've run multiple pieces largely critical of Facebook's business focus on one stop shopping for information and desire to be a news source.

      Clearly this boils down to a business vs. business struggle, but by planting the seed of doubt about Facebook's murky willingness to manipulate content, they undermine Facebook's credibility as a news source. And being taken seriously seems to

    • Is there even such a thing as unbiased news?

      Simple fact-checking becomes a bias if one political faction tends to lie more than the other.

      Even striving to be unbiased can itsself be a form of bias.

  • it seems they were holding Breitbart and Newsmax to the same standards as other news sources, namely to see a story in more than one news source before calling it trendworthy. Hard to fault that.
    • And thus publishers of conspiracy theories, hyperbole and general crankery feel unfairly treated because Facebook is suppressing their stories.

  • Why? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Fuzi719 ( 1107665 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @09:32AM (#52171081)
    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.
  • Why is there any human intervention at all? If this is truly "trending" news then it should make the list solely based on a numbers based algorithm that looks at not only what the major news agencies are reporting but, more importantly, what is being discussed. Facebook keeps track of how many "likes" a story gets and how many Shares it gets and how many comments are posted to any given story.

    That should be what determines what is trending. Not some collection of editors. What exactly are they going to "tra

    • The problem is that every time somebody tries this approach, public relations drones have it hacked in no time, and topics they're being paid to pump mysteriously rise to the top.

      Whether anybody wants to admit it or not, the best approach to judging what's actually trending includes some human component.

  • Look, anybody who uses FB as their primary source of news should be publicly ridiculed. It is an amalgamation, like Slashdot. A secondary source (at best) with public commentary. What is truly disappointing is how some *actual* news shows use FB trending topics as a source of their news. Which is almost as bad as virtual man-on-the-street segments where somebody from CNN or Fox News actually reads random twitter posts. Seriously? Is this what has become of our beloved first amendment right to free press? No
  • Zuck must read slashdot, he pretty much took my advice:

    https://politics.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]

"Consequences, Schmonsequences, as long as I'm rich." -- Looney Tunes, Ali Baba Bunny (1957, Chuck Jones)

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