And (b) to fire all the humans providing normal, valuable editorial oversight to Trending, letting the system become completely algorithmically driven, 2.5 months before the 2016 election.https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/29/facebook-fires-trending-topics-team-algorithm …
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Which led, inevitably, to countless examples of fake news being promoted in Trending — *actively* pushing tons of misinformation in front of hundreds of millions of people.https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/facebook-fires-human-editors-algorithm-immediately-posts-fake-news/ …
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If the Gizmodo story had been responsible — "Facebook actually uses humans, not just code, in making Trending" — FB would not have been pushing those fake news stories out of their contained circles of FB users and out to *all* Facebook users in the weeks before the election.
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So no, you don't get to take credit for Facebook's "current unwinding." Good journalism exposes bad behavior and leads to improvements. The Gizmodo story made reasonable behavior *look* like bad behavior and led to us all being worse off. /end
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Replying to @WillOremus
But that story could have easily been written without the bogus "suppressing conservatives" angle. "Facebook says an algo picks Trending — but we talked to the humans who actually do," etc.
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Replying to @WillOremus
But the thing is normal boring editing wasn't the problem for people to get fired up about. 99% of News Feed's problems for democracy are about algo amplification — so getting people falsely fired up about "human libs pulling strings" was exactly the wrong thing to do
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Replying to @jbenton @WillOremus
I'm with
@jbenton. Both press *and* Facebook got played. From all actual reporting, the "editors" were doing minimal, boring weeding out of especially eggregious stuff. There was no scandal. FB often deserves bashing, but media often cannot discern when and why—and gets played.1 reply 4 retweets 11 likes -
Facebook admitted in its 2016 response to Sen. Thune that it could not reconstruct logs during the period we reported on. The truth is there were no guidelines or oversight when Trending launched — something I haven’t seen in “actual” reporting. https://www.commerce.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/93a14e98-2443-4d27-bf04-1fc59b8cf2b4/22796A1389F52BE16D225F9A03FB53F8.facebook-letter.pdf …pic.twitter.com/sSDE8xN8Tp
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Facebook does things haphazardly—worth criticizing and is a real problem—is not the same as "Facebook routinely censored conservative news", the headline that has not been supported by anything besides hunger for clicks, and has caused huge harm thanks also to press gullibility.
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This was the result of FB’s haphazard behavior — as told in the story.
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Misreporting, exaggrating, making false claims—"routinely censored conservatives"—is not due to Facebook—except indirectly that clickbait is something due to the way digital economy works, with Facebook at the center. Misdiagnosing the problem is 1-wrong, 2-caused enormous harm.
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