![]() ![]() It's also asked for a complete list of stories that have been manually removed from or added to the automatically generated list since January 2014. The Senate Commerce Committee has now asked Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg to explain exactly how the trending topics feature works whether and how it has investigated the allegations of political bias and what measures it takes to stop such behavior. It says that although human editors do tweak the rankings, this is only done to remove the influence of hoaxes and bogus stories, and never for political reasons. In many cases, this became a self-fulfilling prophecy: the inclusion of a story in the trending topics meant more Facebook users read it and went on to share it, meaning the stories would then get to the top of the ranking 'for real.' Facebook Says Editors Are Simply Hoax-Bustersįacebook told the Wall Street Journal there's no evidence the claims of bias and manipulation are true. They do say managers told them to manually add stories which were being covered strongly by major news sites but weren't 'organically' showing up in the Facebook rankings. The staff say these manipulations were purely the result of individual staff actions and that Facebook management neither ordered nor knew about the changes. They also tweaked the calculations to downplay the importance of some "non-mainstream" news sites with a conservative slant. In particular, they manually removed stories about Facebook itself and stories which were on conservative topics. However, tech site Gizmodo cites several former Facebook staff who say colleagues manipulated the rankings with editorial control. Conservative Sites And Stories Downplayed Trending Topics is separate to the main news feed that's made up of status updates, pictures and articles shared by the user's own friends. It's presented as a list of the news topics and stories that users are most sharing and talking about on the site, with the impression being that its a purely objective ranking based on raw numbers. ![]() Shanice Stewart said she and her 8-year-old son were pulled over on the Sacramento, Calif. The feature is the list of news articles that appears on the Facebook web page when users are logged in. Mom and 8-year-old son held at gunpoint after police mistake identity. That hasn't satisfied a Senate committee which has now demanded more information about how the feature works. Facebook has rejected claims that its staff manually 'suppressed' conservative-slanted news stories in its trending topics feature. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |