6 ms·
It is hard for me to believe that one employee could show this kind of bias for this long without being noticed. It had to be more systematic and widespread. B
by abhi3 10y ago
It is hard for me to believe that one employee could show this kind of bias for this long without being noticed. It had to be more systematic and widespread. But good to see FB admitting it and taking corrective action.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y agoIt's more likely that their "liberal bias" reflected the general culture at FB and therefore seemed normal to most people.
- VLM 10y agoNote that there's no need for a conspiracy or even a bias. Or even an official stated policy. FB is ground zero for hyper holiness signalling spiral, extroverted, somewhat narcissistic, workforce automation software for the middle school girl social experience of shunning and friending and whatnot. Its has little relation to the real world, yet strangely reflects it, much like an augmented reality game like Ingress. It would be highly surprising if the tiny fraction of the population that are "whales" in terms of unusually heavy participation in such a weird activity are of a political outlook remotely similar to that of the general population. Its like a shocking expose of the really large amount of praying going on in churches. It doesn't require a conspiracy or a mysterious pro-prayer bias. All you need for non-typical beliefs and behavior is a weird filter that keeps out most of the general population plus self selection bias and you're off to the races. Theres probably a more general theory that the more wall clock time is spent by participants in a subculture, the less likely the subculture's values will align with, or even make sense when compared to, the main culture. Groupthink conquerors all.
- sergiotapia 10y agoI also kind of rolled my eyes at the "rogue employee" angle. I hope Facebook makes things right.
- vkou 10y agoMakes things right? There are no expectations of impartiality in American media.
- sergiotapia 10y ago@voku of course there is, otherwise this wouldn't be news.
- abiox 10y agoi tend to think there's a decorum aspect to things, but nobody expects mainstream news to be "unbiased" - it's the WWE of journalism. (not that alt-news or blogs are often any different.) court cases have established that, really, "free speech" and other things end up meaning that "the news" can lie, distort and implicate whatever it wants, whenever it wants, to fantastical degrees.
- vkou 10y agoThis is manufactured outrage. As mentioned by abiox, in a free country, every source of news is free to lie and distort things as much as it feels like. Facebook having an anti-conservative slant (true or not) is about as newsworthy as Fox News having an anti-reason slant. For some reason, though, there aren't too many conservative senators wringing their hands and calling for an investigation into the latter.
- Torgo 10y agoAll this proves is that the distinction between government and private entity suppression of speech (see: that moronic XKCD cartoon) is a bullshit distinction when your communications mediums are owned by megacorps.
- talmand 10y agoActually, courts have established that the first amendment does not necessarily allow anyone to lie and distort things as much as they wish. There are limitations. It's just that some people are better than others at skirting along that line.
- kbenson 10y agoIt's more likely that there was a policy in place that allowed for some curation, and either the policy targeted a specific political subset of news for removal unintentionally, or the policy was vague enough to allow the political leanings of the people tasked with carrying it out to express themselves. Then again, maybe it's also a matter of a specific subset of news which is often factually incorrect and associated with a political view, such as conservative reporting on climate science (not that the same isn't true for some liberal new items, but this is a fairly egregious example).