I often look at the “Trending” section of my Facebook page and wonder what people are smoking. But I understand that what is trending is not always (okay, ever) going to be what’s important to me. At least “top shares” or “top linked” is an objective measure that makes some sense. But according to a recent article in Gizmodo, there are actually people deciding what goes on that list, and that it’s manipulated more often than we realize.
“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” said the former curator. This individual asked to remain anonymous, citing fear of retribution from the company. The former curator is politically conservative, one of a very small handful of curators with such views on the trending team. “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.”
As the article goes on to explain, it’s difficult to pin any culpability on the company itself, except perhaps in who it hired to curate the feed, but at the very least this article should shed doubt on Facebook’s objectivity. Your Trending feed is being determined by something or someone that is not guaranteed neutral any more than individual reporters are neutral or news agencies are neutral.
Several former curators said that as the trending news algorithm improved, there were fewer instances of stories being injected. They also said that the trending news process was constantly being changed, so there’s no way to know exactly how the module is run now. But the revelations undermine any presumption of Facebook as a neutral pipeline for news, or the trending news module as an algorithmically-driven list of what people are actually talking about.
A social media platform doesn’t have to have sinister intentions to use their power to manipulate our access to information. Far too many people these days are completely unaware of their bias, and so can make sure you see only what they want you to see without even realizing they’re not as objective as they believe. Critical thinking is…well, critical these days, and often the first person we should question is ourselves. But next should be our primary sources of information. Are they truly neutral? Are they really giving you the entire picture or just the part they want you to see?
More and more “news” these days is not really news, but merely commentary–and with less and less effort made to disguise that fact. They’ve found that we don’t really question any more so much as look for the talking head who expresses the ideas we want to hear in the manner we most enjoy hearing. Is it any wonder we have kids in colleges freaking out when they encounter an idea they don’t like?
Hard to argue.