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Comment by lazzlazzlazz | Hacker News Reader

> “It was absolutely bias. We were doing it subjectively. It just depends on who the curator is and what time of day it is,” said the former curator.

> Other former curators interviewed by Gizmodo denied consciously suppressing conservative news, and we were unable to determine if left-wing news topics or sources were similarly suppressed. The conservative curator described the omissions as a function of his colleagues’ judgements; there is no evidence that Facebook management mandated or was even aware of any political bias at work.

It sounds like any issues were from curators who weren't being adequately supervised, instead of top-down orders from executives at Facebook.

This is different than what the current Hacker News headline suggests. Can we all collectively read the article and understand that the issue is different than our preconceptions lead us to believe?

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Or Facebook has learned the art of Plausible Deniability.

If the bias happens during hiring (by preferring candidates who naturally lean left), then Facebook merely needs to give them curation power without giving explicit instructions.

This sounds too much like a conspiracy theory to take very seriously. Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence.

> The Facebook CEO was overheard responding that "we need to do some work" on curtailing anti-immigrant posts about the refugee crisis. "Are you working on this?" Merkel asked in English, to which Zuckerberg replied in the affirmative before the transmission was disrupted.

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/27/angela-merkel-caught-on-hot-m...

Such as the BBC only advertising jobs in the Graun, and wondering why people accuse it of bias.

To be fair, the Sun also do most of their recruitment advertising the in grauniad. The Guardian is the only daily paper with a media recruitment section. It's not surprising that media outlets advertise media jobs in a media recruitment section.

Just because the evidence isn't there doesn't mean there wasn't downward pressure from management. Look at the art of dodging blame as practiced by VW.

There wasn't any evidence and there wasn't any implication from the article. It's very different from the VW scandal.

This does not imply a lack of evidence, though. The appropriate response would be to ask for a deeper inquiry. Otherwise you're just enabling scapegoating if you accept the first view without any question.

> The conservative curator described the omissions as a function of his colleagues’ judgements; there is no evidence that Facebook management mandated or was even aware of any political bias at work.

The person who brought this to light - the one who not only experienced it themselves but also had the most complain about - says that it wasn't anything pushed down by management.

I'm sure his paycheck is entirely unrelated to what he says to the press.

isnt the point of hiring a "curator" to have people select and omit stories based on newsworthiness vs being nonstories?

I would assume this is why they hired people with journalistic backgrounds, but it looks like they should have had some more sophisticated consensus-seeking and quality control mechanisms in place.

i still dont see any report of an actual story being suppressed.

hiding Romney ate honey nut cheerios is very different from hiding Romney donates his breakfast to starving children. The former isnt news, the latter type of suppression would be to purposely create a void of positive Romney stories.

that said, facebook's trending stories are a pile of nonnewsshit anyway, most of them should never be brought to peoples attention by choice.

Irrelevant.

FB is a nuclear weapon. Chain reactions that start there can take out society in a blink. That has to be understood and digested by society. Doesn't matter what the actual story of the day getting filtered is.

Trump has subverted the republican party in 8 months. 8 years ago a community organizer subverted the dems in 2 years. Look at Corbyn, Modi, Kejriwal, Joko etc etc Its thanks to social media and the like pressing herd of programmed robots that populate it.

Who knows how fast a Trump 2.0, 3.0 and then a 4.0 will take to rise. Its just going to get more and more efficient. The people who see this play out real time everyday, whether its Trump, ISIS or Star Wars marketing are those curators on the front lines. They fully understand how fast the process can work.

They are totally unprepared and untrained on what to do if things are unravelling. Its not surprising at all that some take it upon themselves to act like control rods.

Time to take a serious look at...China...yes China. Cause control rods are necessary.

So basically you oppose democracy?

You don't? The Founders did, vehemently[0].

[0] http://www.theunion.com/opinion/7699648-113/democracy-majori...

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