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Saying that there was no bias in their news selection, when it should be readily apparent that having humans select thing would introduce bias. Not quite outrig

Saying that there was no bias in their news selection, when it should be readily apparent that having humans select thing would introduce bias. Not quite outright lying, as you might possibly think they're naive enough to think humans are unbiased, but I don't think they get the benefit of the doubt here. IIRC they also started off saying it was all algorithmic.

abalone 10y ago
Can you cite where they said it was "all" algorithmic? Their investigation found "no evidence of systematic political bias." So, not sure where the very dishonest statement is here.
- _yvjs 10y ago
  The point he's making is that Facebook can't be trusted to self-regulate (in the context of privacy). With that assumption you probably wouldn't accept their opaque self-investigation so placidly. I think the point is that a casual observer would not have guessed trending tropics were so influenced by human intervention, and might have taken them to be an actual reflection of the Facebook hivemind. Further the statement of "no evidence of systematic political bias" is a bit hard to swallow given reports of Facebook employees asking "what Facebook can do to stop Donald Trump" at their all-hands (one of the top 5 questions in a poll [0] not just a lone employee walking up to the microphone). Further, the people curating these feeds are probably underpaid and young, and hence are probably going to skew left of the average journalist. Bias doesn't have to be explicit to be systematic. Anyway I find Donald Trump + much of the rest of the GOP field pretty reprehensible politics-wise, Facebook seems to be handling things well [1], and we shouldn't worry about a conflict of interest as much as w/ advertising+privacy [2], but some amount of vigilance seems wise given how much influence these platforms can have over political outcomes [3]. Twitter in particular seems to have made a few fairly illiberal moves lately from my POV. [0] http://gizmodo.com/facebook-employees-asked-mark-zuckerberg-if-they-should-1771012990 http://gizmodo.com/facebook-employees-asked-mark-zuckerberg-... [1] https://medium.com/@glennbeck/what-disturbed-me-about-the-facebook-meeting-3bbe0b96b87f https://medium.com/@glennbeck/what-disturbed-me-about-the-fa... [2] One shouldn't discount the H1B angle completely though. [3] http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-could-rig-the-2016-election-121548 http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-co...

abalone 10y ago

Can you cite where they said it was "all" algorithmic? Their investigation found "no evidence of systematic political bias." So, not sure where the very dishonest statement is here.

_yvjs 10y ago
The point he's making is that Facebook can't be trusted to self-regulate (in the context of privacy). With that assumption you probably wouldn't accept their opaque self-investigation so placidly. I think the point is that a casual observer would not have guessed trending tropics were so influenced by human intervention, and might have taken them to be an actual reflection of the Facebook hivemind. Further the statement of "no evidence of systematic political bias" is a bit hard to swallow given reports of Facebook employees asking "what Facebook can do to stop Donald Trump" at their all-hands (one of the top 5 questions in a poll [0] not just a lone employee walking up to the microphone). Further, the people curating these feeds are probably underpaid and young, and hence are probably going to skew left of the average journalist. Bias doesn't have to be explicit to be systematic. Anyway I find Donald Trump + much of the rest of the GOP field pretty reprehensible politics-wise, Facebook seems to be handling things well [1], and we shouldn't worry about a conflict of interest as much as w/ advertising+privacy [2], but some amount of vigilance seems wise given how much influence these platforms can have over political outcomes [3]. Twitter in particular seems to have made a few fairly illiberal moves lately from my POV. [0] http://gizmodo.com/facebook-employees-asked-mark-zuckerberg-if-they-should-1771012990 http://gizmodo.com/facebook-employees-asked-mark-zuckerberg-... [1] https://medium.com/@glennbeck/what-disturbed-me-about-the-facebook-meeting-3bbe0b96b87f https://medium.com/@glennbeck/what-disturbed-me-about-the-fa... [2] One shouldn't discount the H1B angle completely though. [3] http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-could-rig-the-2016-election-121548 http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-co...