Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News
This is obviously very bad from the standpoint that the trending news section is ostensibly supposed to be organic, based on user behavior, and free of bias—except that which is inherent in the users themselves sharing things to be picked up as &quot;trending&quot;. It appears that &quot;trending news&quot; has really been &quot;curated news&quot;. Not cool at all.<p>More concerning than trending news actually being curated news is learning that negative stories about Facebook were allegedly actively suppressed. Doublenotcool at all.<p>However, that there is &quot;conservative news&quot; and &quot;liberal news&quot; is even more bothersome. Especially that it&#x27;s offered as something anyone should find to be acceptable as an idea at all.<p>&gt; <i>But we would have to go and find the same story from a more neutral outlet that wasn’t as biased.</i><p>This is delivered as if it is inherently a bad thing, when it most assuredly is not. When I come across a story about anything, I actively prefer to find it covered by a neutral outlet that isn&#x27;t as biased. This is, to me, a good thing, and what news <i>should be</i>. News should be <i>information about events</i>. If I want opinionated and editorialized news, I&#x27;d go after an opinionated and editorialized source. They abound. That anyone who calls themselves a journalist would call out the suppression of &quot;conservative news&quot; or &quot;liberal news&quot;, instead of calling out the elevation and coupling of inherent bias in reporting as the problem itself, strikes me as more than worrisome.<p>To my thinking, there is a difference between news that is of interest to [insert ideological group identification] and news that is delivered through the bias of [insert ideological group identification]. I would love it if there was a way to identify and filter news from a neutral outlet with less (ideally no) bias. I recognize that is largely impossible, as we cannot rid ourselves of our biases very easily. However, we can <i>recognize</i> our biases and seek to counterbalance them. We can also make attempts to actively omit them from news coverage. An outlet can report on facts.<p>That said, it appears this story highlights <i>both</i>: a biased suppression of news that is of interest to conservatives and news that is delivered through the lens of conservatively biased opinion and sources. The former is entirely bad, as it actively omits information that a group would like to know. The second is far less onerous to me, as I personally would love it if there were algorithmic delivery of actual news from outlets that eschewed biased delivery and editorializing.<p>Edit: It is made clear in the article that part of the problem stems from Facebook&#x27;s desire to compete with Twitter for real-time trending news. This is unsurprising, as should the outcome be to readers and users. Facebook created a tool to allow humans to modify news in the trending section that wasn&#x27;t organically trending. Someone thought this would be a competitive net positive because it could allow Facebook curators to keep up with breaking news that was &quot;all over Twitter&quot;. That Facebook hired <i>curators</i>, and that one or more of those curators then divulged information about this tool being used to subjectively inject or suppress stories seems entirely unsurprising. The tool obviously should not exist. Creating it was a very dumb move. Not militantly monitoring and correcting its misuse was even dumber.