Or what if instead of national figures FB or anyone else tried to railroad an SF Supe they didn't particularly like because they shot down their proposed development. Or Menlo Park.
Which is a completely different thing than manipulating their users, which they shouldn't be doing for any reason.
That would imply Facebook's influence doesn't exist, and its $340B valuation is a sham.
In the end though, you're basically just playing at the margins.
This could be already describing what you are suggesting.
The types of trending topics that are blacklisted tend to be low quality trends. Say #FollowFriday, or take examples from the current Twitter trends, #mondaymotivation, #MondayMorning, #DressAFilm, or #MondayBlogs.
They also will blacklist a trend when it's a duplicate of another trend say #GoodWifeFarewll vs #TheGoodWife. In fact, they'd probably try to combine those two if the clustering algorithm failed, and then relabel it "The Good Wife" since it undoubtedly corresponds to a FB page.
The manipulation of the candidate set of trends is there because the trending algorithm and the clustering algorithm is too noisy to publicly surface. The trends you actually see are algorithmically chosen based on your behavior.
http://thehill.com/policy/technology/279192-report-facebook-...
http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-supp...
Well, there you go. Quite frankly there's a neutral editorial voice that FB wants to project. And so the main article has to be from a legitimate unbiased news source. Brietbart, Newsmax, and the like simply aren't.
Having a list of approved sources to highlight is really common I these types of products, because no one wants Stormfront to be on the front page.
Of the topics don't get out of the ghetto of subculture's echo chamber, it's never going to be approved. Even the topics cited are basically just birther conspiracy du jour.
Even if the topic gets approved with a different main link, everything is being shown on the results page, just not with a gold star next to it in the top slot.
Personally I would regard Breitbart or Newsmax are just on par with HuffPo - for you they probably aren't. That's why pretending to know what others have to perceive as "legitimate unbiased news" is such a delicate issue that should not be done in secrecy.
Non-transparency on blacklisted sites and topics will always lead to distrust and the expectation of one-sided political shilling.
Sure you could publicize your approved list of sites, but then you're just going to attract a bunch of people with an agenda to trying to promote their agenda by claiming some sort of slight by not being included. In the end though, the only honest response to this criticism is, "Screw you. Make your own site."
Topics aren't blacklisted except when they duplicate something else. Most topics simply aren't approved for trending. If you want to know what's not approved, look at Twitter trends, it's full of junk. Honestly, that's the best public example of what the trending topics algorithm detects.
You really need to read Tom Stocky's post about this, because that's exactly how it's run. But you don't really have to, because it's exactly what I told you.
Finally, if you actually click on any of the trends, pretty much everything on that page is algorithmic. Find a trend that mentions, Obama, I'm sure you're going to find a racist post on that list, because there's always scummy people.
PS. For the record, I always feel dirty if I visit HuffPo. Gawker on the other hand, I'll own up to reading that tabloid.
I personally choose to not use Facebook specifically for these reasons. Even though I know many Facebook employees personally, I don't trust it's employees to divorce their own interests and their powerful position as Facebook's curators.
So anything they might do which appears to be editorialisitc in nature regarding politics would be of concern.
They were also discouraged from mentioning Twitter by name in headlines and summaries, and instead asked to refer to social media in a broader context.
I guess it's plausible to me that a new company like FB lacks some sort of important company culture for reporting that the NY Times has by virtue of its long history, but this seems minor. The real issue is (1) the consolidation in the news industry and (2) its political homogeneity. FB and the NY Times are each examples of both.
"The fifth experiment is especially notable in that it was conducted with eligible voters throughout India in the midst of India’s 2014 Lok Sabha elections just before the final votes were cast. The results of these experiments demonstrate that (i) biased search rankings can shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20% or more, (ii) the shift can be much higher in some demographic groups, and (iii) search ranking bias can be masked so that people show no awareness of the manipulation."
The goal shouldn't be to "stop Trump" — that's not what we want a news distributor to do. I don't want bias against a particular person in my news distributors. What I want is for my news distributors to actually have ethical standards that enable them to serve the public good (and as a by product hopefully prevent lying demagogue's from gaining power).
Is it "bias" to use a standardized method or algorithm (even one that involves humans reading natural language") to filter content by accuracy and provide some interface indication not just for phishing, and for porn, but also for falsehoods?
In fact, decisions which Facebook makes this election season will impact the result regardless of the intentionality behind those decisions. Even something as mundane as the mix between links and images impacts different candidates disparately.
That said, I absolutely think that Facebook and other major media outlets should be held to a form of the Equal Time rule:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule
The fact that we don't have an equivalent rule for major websites is a serious problem.
Screw 'em. If they want to play the corporate welfare game, they can abide by the equal time rule.
Can you expand on this a bit? Do you mean to say when you turn on the tap in the kitchen nothing comes out and that you are no longer able to use the shower or flush the toilet?
It is crazy how much money we just give to profitable companies.
Progress hey, it's tricky.
As for taxes, what taxes do you think were going to be assessed on this property? It was an empty piece of land before FB arrived so it was not like the city was losing much property tax to begin with. In return Facebook is paying salaries for forty or so people on site and the thousand or so who worked for over two years building the site. Oh, and because tech firms like it when others do the research and general site selection you will notice that Microsoft is dumping tens of millions into a data center in West Des Moines as well. You're welcome.
You "allowed" it because it was a good deal for a city like Altoona that otherwise was not much more than an amusement park and the last place to get gas on I-80 before you hit Des Moines.
They started the profile badges thing and folks thought that was so cool.
I had to explain to them that this is one more data point for Facebook - if I change my profile badge to a Manchester United logo, it probably means that I really, really care about Manchester United.
I can then be targeted by an advertiser that wants to sell merchandise to Manchester United fans
And why is this itself a bad thing?
Poe's law or whatever, but I can't even imagine a worst possible candidate than Trump, even Eric Cartman would be a better president than this Daily-mail-esque cartoon of human being.