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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Facebook already responded:

https://www.facebook.com/tstocky/posts/10100853082337958?pnr...

TL;DR: We don't manipulate the feed and we're pretty sure none of our contractors have, and we've checked before, but we'll check again.

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Their use of contractors is subtle. I'm sure employees manipulated the feed. The research they did in 2012 with Cornell had Facebook directly manipulating feeds to illicit emotional outcomes and they measured how those emotions propagated out to the rest of the subject's network.

Again, the question is not if but, how much they manipulate. Calling it an "Algorithm" that is staffed by "Quality Editors" who can group tags and things together to make trending topics bigger is just a defense mechanism. Facebook can say or make anything they want to appear or disappear in your feed.

No. That does not happen. I worked on it. If you read all the articles, all of them tell the exact same story. Trends are detected, and then approved to go into a candidate set to be algorithmically ranked for each person. As part of approval, the curators write the headline, snippet, and choose the top article on the results page according to a standard that insists on an unbiased widely recognized news source. The accusation of bias boils down to, "I wanted to link to Breitbart, but that's not unbiased source, so I had to link to the AP." Well call the whambulance! You can't link to alternet either.

The criteria for allowing a source are not objective — and how could they be, when all sources are more or less bad? I understand that on the same story you will allow sheer propaganda from the BBC, but don't allow a factual report from The Intercept. The latter is unlikely to be a comfortable read, and may lead to some users quitting.

But don't pretend there is some objective measure of "unbiased" that for example The Guardian or BBC pass and other outlets don't. That is the same mindset any gatekeeper has: to bring the best news to the readers, where "best" is of course subjective. Be it with an algorithm or directly, Facebook editorializes — heavily, it would appear.

> the curators write the headline, snippet, and choose the top article on the results page according to a standard that insists on an unbiased widely recognized news source

An unbiased news source does not exist. The very fact that 'newsworthiness' is subjective should be tipping you off.

If you think topics such as #PoemYourLife and #1LineWed are newsworthy, you're welcome to it.

It's more that a source like the NYTimes has biases of its own, that you seem to think doesn't count as 'actual' bias.

It's funny how the debate on this has skipped directly to whether it's OK for Facebook to do it not whether they actually did it. Also, the allegations are that a few curators suppressed news stories from conservative sites from appearing on the trending news feed. Even if this turns out to be true it's a far cry from the "Facebook is censoring news!!!" allegations that are being thrown around.

The FB post you linked to is a response to the general allegations, and not a response to the Senate's request. Thune's letter quotes part of tstocky's post:

> In a statement responding to the allegations, Facebook has claimed to have “rigorous guidelines in place for the review team” to prevent “the suppression of political perspectives” or the “prioritization of one viewpoint over another or one news outlet over another.”

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