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The most disturbing to me is not even favoritism and sexism conditions at work (which is ironic given Sheryl Sandberg's book and official line), but the fact th
by amaks 10y ago
The most disturbing to me is not even favoritism and sexism conditions at work (which is ironic given Sheryl Sandberg's book and official line), but the fact that Facebook: 1. uses humans to pick the trending topics, which are inherently biased in one way or another; 2. the trending sources are very limited and curated (e.g. no Twitter), which is clearly anti-competitive practices.
- ryanSrich 10y agoIndeed. Facebook is one of those incredibly evil companies that has duped the public into giving them all of their data. There's no going back either.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y agoWhat obligations does Facebook have to include Twitter sources, or to ensure trending topics are unbiased?
- balls187 10y agoUser Trust. Also this isn't just about censoring Twitter as a source, but rather twitter as a topic in an trending topic. Tangentially related: should facebook hide posts made by Twitter employees?
- Animats 10y agoWikipedia doesn't consider Twitter a reliable source. Why should Facebook?
- ucaetano 10y agoFacebook uses Facebook as a source, which is as reliable as Twitter.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y agoPerhaps that obviates the need to include Twitter
- redthrowaway 10y agoNone, but it's important that people know that the trending topics are not what's popular on facebook, but rather what facebook employees have decided to promote on facebook. Other than that, it's their platform and their company. They can run it however they want.
- venomsnake 10y agoInteresting question. I think that Facebook/Twitter and such are becoming utilities for a sizable chunk of the audience lately. So don't be surprised if they get to their Standard Oil moment in the future.
- flashman 10y agoHow would you design an unbiased news recommendation algorithm? You can't - the definition of 'trending' has to include decisions and values. Is the most-shared story always relevant to a wide audience? An organised brigade (think a grassroots political campaign) could use coordinated sharing to bootstrap their way onto the trending list. That would devalue the trending list. More broadly, you have to teach code to autonomously infer relevance from ambiguous signals. And once you do that, you're still not unbiased; you've simply delegated bias to your audience. Humans are not perfect, but I would still privilege human editorial judgement above algorithms for the time being. But I agree the question of what issues and perspectives people are exposed to, and who controls what they see, is incredibly important. Just too important to abstract away to a machine.
- airtonix 10y agoHah, it's a Guardian article trying to look unbiased by concern trolling us all about the same old shit. Does anyone even take Guardian seriously except liberal left socialists living in a dream world?
- amelius 10y ago> uses humans to pick the trending topics, which are inherently biased in one way or another Isn't the definition of trending that something got into a positive human-bias feedback loop?
- golergka 10y agoAny definition of "trending" will be a function of a set of humans something is trending with. So, Facebook makes an error of using one set of people to decide what is trending for another set of people. And to be honest, I don't think that typical US journalist has the same taste (and the same political preference, for that matter) as general US population.