#77: Facebook Bias? The Right Over-Reacts

Tech Policy Podcast

TechFreedom

Technology

4.8 • 45 Ratings

🗓️ 10 May 2016

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Is Facebook biased against conservatives? Gizmodo ran a story today based on interviews with former contractors for Facebook, who “curated” the otherwise-machine-generated “Trending Topics” next to the Newsfeed (the real heart of the Facebook experience). They allege that other “curators” implemented their own political bias in writing blurbs about trending stories, excluding conservative themes and publications, and injecting left-of-center stories. Gizmodo acknowledges that no one alleges Facebook management actually directed such bias, but buries this point, which most outraged conservatives have missed. So what’s going on? Is Facebook really out to get the Right? Or is this just independent contractors failing to uphold company policy on a tangential feature of the site? Should Facebook simply do more to enforce its own stated policies of official neutrality? Evan and Berin (of course) discuss.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast.
0:10.7	I'm Evan Schwarger, your host.
0:12.6	On today's show, is Facebook biased against conservative news?
0:17.1	Today, Gizmodo, a website dedicated to tech News, publish a story featuring interviews with former Facebook employees known as, quote, news curators.
0:28.3	And these employees had a role in deciding which stories would be put into the trending section of the website.
0:34.7	And if you're a Facebook user, you notice at the top right hand corner of
0:38.9	your interface is a list of trending topics. And while most of those topics are offered up by an
0:46.0	algorithm, human beings were in charge of choosing which of those computer generated options
0:52.2	would actually end up trending. And each user's experience is different
0:57.3	based on geography and who you're friends with and things like that. But the basic gist is that these
1:01.9	employees said that they were routinely suppressing conservative news from the trending section.
1:08.8	Now, joining me to discuss this is Barron Soka, someone who uses
1:13.3	Facebook quite often. Barron, thank you for joining me. Oh, well, that was the first uninsulting
1:18.5	comment you've made it introducing me. Well, that depends on who you ask. But anyway,
1:23.3	yeah, check out Barron's Facebook feed and then you can decide whether that was an insult or not.
1:27.3	But anyway, so Barron, the Gizmodo story, what exactly is the story suggesting that these people did?
1:34.7	Well, there are a few different things.
1:36.8	So we should make sure this is clear here.
1:40.3	This is not about the news feed.
1:41.7	The news feed is the stream of stories that most people
1:44.6	experience as Facebook. That's what people think of as Facebook. As you said, the trending
1:50.7	sidebar is a feature that Facebook added on the right is essentially to imitate Twitter. Twitter
	...

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