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15 Feb ’12
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According to this article anyways
Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project.
This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.
more http://gizmodo.com/f.....1775461006
And of course the senate wants to investigate
The chairman of the powerful Senate Commerce Committee asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to respond to allegations that the social network's news curators actively suppress conservative viewpoints and articles.
Committee Chairman Sen. John Thune wrote that Facebook has emerged as an important source of news and civil discourse for millions of Americans. If the allegations of routine censorship and politically motivated news manipulation reported by Gizmodo are true, it undermines the social network's claims that it serves as an open, neutral platform.
“Facebook must answer these serious allegations and hold those responsible to account if there has been political bias in the dissemination of trending news,” said Thune on sending the letter. “Any attempt by a neutral and inclusive social media platform to censor or manipulate political discussion is an abuse of trust and inconsistent with the values of an open internet.”
more http://www.recode.ne.....ation-bias
And zuckenberg is having a meeting with conservative thought leaders.
(Reuters) - Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg will meet this week with prominent conservatives in the media, a spokesman said on Sunday, to address allegations of political bias at the popular social networking site.
Some 12 "conservative thought leaders" will join the meeting with Zuckerberg on Wednesday, a Facebook spokesman said. Among the invitees are media personality Glenn Beck, Fox News Channel's "The Five" co-host Dana Perino and Zac Moffatt, co-founder of Targeted Victory, a technology company that aims to bring transparency to media buying.
Facebook came under fire last week when an unnamed former employee told technology news website Gizmodo that workers often omitted conservative political stories from the company's "trending" list of topics.
Zuckerberg said Facebook has "found no evidence that this report is true," but would continue to investigate. A U.S. Senate committee has also opened an inquiry into Facebook's practices.
He should tell them to go pound sand, it's a private business and he can do what he wants.
19 Feb ’12
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News Story number six will shock you!
Real journalists hate these guys!!
15 Feb ’12
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lol, I hate those click bait titles
4 Mar ’12
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turns out that social media is not so social
15 Feb ’12
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farmboy2 said
turns out that social media is not so social
I hate social media, it is something I struggle with to get our message out.
6 Feb ’14
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I am literally the last person on the planet to come to Facebook's defense, but they apparently held a meeting with a conference room full of journalists to address concerns and dispel rumors. I've not seen any evidence or even anything to make me think it happened. I've only seen finger pointing and jumping on the (finger pointing) bandwagon.
15 Feb ’12
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looks like it was happening
Facebook’s Trending news section includes topics that aren’t actually trending on Facebook, according to a statement from the company today.
The admission came after The Guardian published a trove of documents, including a copy of Facebook’s “Trending Review Guidelines” used to train workers—known internally as “news curators”—who run the platform’s trending section. As Gizmodo previously reported, Facebook’s trending section is run largely like a newsroom and curators can “inject” and “blacklist” topics.
Facebook’s vice president of global operations Justin Osofsky today said topics that can be included in the trending module are first surfaced by an algorithm that “identifies topics that have recently spiked in popularity on Facebook.”
But that algorithm “also uses an external RSS website crawler to identify breaking events,” Osofsky’s statement continued.
Osofsky’s statement appeared to contradict a statement released by Facebook’s vice president of search Tom Stocky on Tuesday in response to Gizmodo’s reporting. In that statement, Stocky said the trending module was “designed to showcase the current conversation happening on Facebook.” Stocky also said that “we do not insert stories artificially into trending topics.” Stocky’s statement does not acknowledge the use of an RSS feed to pipe in topics not generating organic buzz on Facebook.
The trending review guidelines released today refer to both “organic” and “external” topics that are surfaced via algorithm for inclusion in the trending module. Organic topics indicate a subject being “mentioned on Facebook significantly more than its normal level of buzz,” while external topics “are detected by crawling RSS feeds of headlines from top news sites.”
“They used external topics all the way until I stopped working there,” said one former curator, who left Facebook in mid-2015 and describes Stocky’s statement from earlier this week as “bullshit.”
“The idea behind external topics was to push more hard news into people’s feeds,” the same individual said. “It was a form of injection into the back-end algorithm list of trending topics.”
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