I worked on Facebook's Trending team
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Does anyone really say that working at a tech giant as a non-engineer is an opportunity of a lifetime?
I have had multiple friends who worked at Google on AdSense sales, and it certainly didn't do anything for their careers. I can't imagine it did much for their savings, either.
Most editorial jobs nowadays want exactly "social media curator at <Big Internet Co>", because that's where the market is going.
Unlike SWE, journalism (and many other careers) isn't really a career where recruiters just jump at you from the bushes if you're distracted.
A lot of people actually go on unpaid internships to try and get a job.
> Does anyone really say that working at a tech giant as a non-engineer is an opportunity of a lifetime?
The author is a journalist, practicing in a field which has been decimated, writing about working @ the most popular platform on the planet.
Working as a contractor.
To someone in the Silicon Valley bubble comparing a PMM role at Google to a PMM role at Uber or Airbnb, it may be difficult to see the real value of Google on a resume.
However, to most people in the world those roles are all opportunities of a lifetime. If you look at my peers in every job I've held since working at Google and treated Google as a neutral company (i.e. not having any real career boosting value), I would have been by far the least qualified individual in many of those roles. Having Google on my resume landed me interviews and job offers I would not otherwise have gotten.
It also suggests a credibility to employers in the non-engineering world because many believe that an employee at Google must be super intelligent and highly competent. Believe it or not, I'd venture to say that this is more so true outside of Silicon Valley (where Google isn't as common of a former employee among job applicants) than inside. But I think it boosts your career prospects either way.
The key, like most things in life, is how the individual chooses to leverage the name recognition on their resume and supplement that experience with other experiences.
There are no journalism/writing jobs that have the kinds of perks that big tech firms have. Free lunch every day?!
Sentiment like that probably played a part at such toxic environment at places like these..
I have a feeling the curators were seen as a necessary evil until the machines were good enough to replace them. So they were treated as such and their work wasn't well planned/prioritized from the top.
The lack of direct guidelines and hand-holding from management indicates that there wasn't much interest in establishing long-term processes. Which high-turnover contractor worker bees usually require, compared to leaving them alone where they are required to make their own decisions (with potential consequences).
>“Facebook relies heavily on just 10 news sources to determine whether a trending news story has editorial authority.”
>"Several times curators were penalized for using Twitter in descriptions."
It seems that Facebook is likely to manipulate the news by selecting the "right" sources. If there's bias it most likely come from the selection, I wonder what are the source titles. Also, penalizing for mentioning Twitter shows that they put their own intrest over their users. It is understandable to some degree from the economic point of view, but it also shows the danger of having one company dominating the market. Facebook is not that benign, even now.
Also this isn't just about censoring Twitter as a source, but rather twitter as a topic in an trending topic.
Tangentially related: should facebook hide posts made by Twitter employees?
Other than that, it's their platform and their company. They can run it however they want.
Is the most-shared story always relevant to a wide audience? An organised brigade (think a grassroots political campaign) could use coordinated sharing to bootstrap their way onto the trending list. That would devalue the trending list.
More broadly, you have to teach code to autonomously infer relevance from ambiguous signals. And once you do that, you're still not unbiased; you've simply delegated bias to your audience.
Humans are not perfect, but I would still privilege human editorial judgement above algorithms for the time being. But I agree the question of what issues and perspectives people are exposed to, and who controls what they see, is incredibly important. Just too important to abstract away to a machine.
Does anyone even take Guardian seriously except liberal left socialists living in a dream world?
Isn't the definition of trending that something got into a positive human-bias feedback loop?
So, Facebook makes an error of using one set of people to decide what is trending for another set of people. And to be honest, I don't think that typical US journalist has the same taste (and the same political preference, for that matter) as general US population.
I can't make heads or tails of what I'm supposed to pay attention to.
It might be a combination of designers and writers working on large monitors, having multiple tall narrow windows open, and people using iPads in portrait mode.
Users of 11" and 13" laptops seems to have been forgotten in this new design trend.
That's quite disturbing
If they just need you to get more work done, you may be right.
But if you got a skill no one else at the company has, they are rather nice to you.
"Reading his comments it made me wonder if men might be disposed to scar more easily (or women are more defiant) from this kind of treatment, creating a negative feedback loop in subsequent jobs and roles which negatively affects their careers. This is not intended to be a criticism of men, but rather it's question which may have important implications. Women may externalize this kind of sandbagging and stonewalling while men may tend to internalize it. If so it may be a much bigger deal than it may appear to a woman because we're damaging our talent pool."
Could have maybe used a couple more "tend to" statements, but doesn't seem horribly unreasonable to me.
(And looks, in many ways, equally valid as a hypothesis. Not in all elements, but there is a culture of the "strong man" who simply internalises stress and conflict in a lot of places.)
Why isn't that level of intensity of noise given to issues like men not going to university as much as women? Where are the men-only scholarships? Where are the university quotas for men?
Why are only men drafted? Why are they almost always sent to the front lines to fight and die and women, if they decide to join the military, are given much safer support roles?
Why are there more male suicides then women?
Why are men almost exclusively put in jail for failing to pay child support even though there is a greater percentage of deadbeat moms than deadbeat dads.
Who is supposedly "fixing men's problems"? The candidates don't care. The news doesn't care. The only one who can seem to do it is the man himself.
I stand by my statement.
For example, it is very likely that I will get banned for this statement:
"The Y chromosome in primates results in sexual dimorphism, which leads to differences in physiology and behavior between the sexes."
A research team in Sweden wanted to test if there existed bias in who get declared criminal insane. They took a larger number of current working criminal psychiatrist and gave them a fake profile of a criminal. For half the participants, the otherwise identical profile had the name of the criminal be that of a typical male, and the other half got the profile with a typical female name. Everything else being equal, both group should have rated the profile as equally in/sane.
The result was that the female version was 4 times more likely to be deemed criminal insane and thus not responsible for their action. This has real effect on justice, and its not getting fixed in any time soon. The culture just is that men who do bad things are evil, and women who do bad things are insane, and justice reflect the people who live in that culture.
Or to bring an other example. In the duration of a single week there were two stories on Swedish national news. In the first one, a young women was put against her will in a mental institute, and had her arms and leg put into a cast in order to "prevent her from harming herself". The cause of this was a meeting with a psychiatrist where she had said "I don't know what I might do to myself", and the whole story was presented as an strong example of current overreaction by the psychiatric system towards women.
The second story had a man go to the hospital telling the staff that he was hearing gods voice and it was telling him to kill his daughter in order to grant her eternal life. The staff sad that it sounded serious, but the psychiatry ward were full so he should return next week. He then went home and murdered his daughter with a knife. The hospital said in the article that maybe they should taken the situation a bit more serious.
The problems that get fixed are only those that fit the current gender culture and gender identity. Men are all strong, has perfect health, and are wealthy, so biases from those assumptions are not getting fixed any time soon. Same is true for biases for women, in that the biases that people do care about is those that fit current gender culture and gender identity. Neither women or men is benefiting from this.
> There is no political bias that I know of and we were never told to suppress conservative news.
But then later goes on to say:
> “Facebook relies heavily on just 10 news sources to determine whether a trending news story has editorial authority.” The problem is, even after repeated questions and requests for guidance, no one ever explained what that meant. Much of it was left to interpretation for curators and copy editors. Topics are treated differently depending on who you are working with.
Which leads to a fairly obvious observation: providing insufficient editorial guidelines leaves room for unconscious bias to take over.
Of course, qualified journalists should be aware of their own biases and be able to compensate for them. Unfortunately, journalism in the US is becoming increasingly less valued and more partisan.
I wouldn't be surprised if this whole bias fiasco was an unexpected side-effect of Facebook hiring largely left-leaning editorial staff.
I always assumed that this was exactly what's going on. You don't need a handbook that says "stifle conversative stuff", you just need vague rules, managers playing the world's worst game of corporate telephone, and a bunch of disorganization.
Life at large companies...
If you are unable to see through the looking glass, then why would you ever come to the conclusion that you're biased?
Why do people seem to think all journalists are left-leaning?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/05/06/ju...
Without logical points to debate, your comment is just noise.
Unfortunately, so is my reply.
So, average bay area residents...
Fully agree. Things like this tend to be better explained, as a rule, as side effects, without resorting to agency or conspiracies. That specific information, however is not new as of this article ("As the Guardian reported in leaked documents...." precedes the bit you quoted in TFA).
Probably should have immediately said they'd review it, then found that, uninstructed, some editors may have shown a "slight bias".
And coincidentally it comes out coinciding with a US "conservative" candidate that's talking about rigged processes and unfair treatment.
[0]https://fbnewsroomus.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/full-trendi...
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/16/books/chapters/0316-1st-al...
It's becoming a very predictable trick. I can't imagine I'm the only one who sees this.
Which ones?
I don't use Facebook, but over the last several years I kept hearing from a number of non-PC type news outlets (that I subscribe to) that even as their media platform grew and doubled and tripled, at the same time their Facebook engagement became a small fraction of what it used to be.
I've also heard that one of the quickest ways to get your Facebook account terminated in Germany is to say anything negative about the current migration situation that becomes popular or starts to get views.
This article IMO is a way to hide the real story with another story.
I'm not defending Facebook but I have yet to see any substance to the argument that they are manipulating the conversation on their platform.
But here is one about Germany - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/26/mark-zuck...
Though to understand what it is really talking about, you have to understand the redefinition of "hate speech" that has happened through-out the EU.
As an American this is especially interesting to me because we place such value on our freedom of speech but also pay a high price in the hate speech that is viewed as a necessary evil. It seems that the EU has made an attempt to manage this hateful speech but I'm not familiar with the specifics.
German blog post about it: http://www.internet-law.de/2015/09/muss-facebook-staerker-ge...
This is just not true. There a lot of pages and groups that basically do hate speech and most of them are still there. E.g. there is a page called Anonymous that is not connected to the movement that spreads often false conspiracy prone right wring talking points and quack. It's still there (all through posting was disabled? by facebook).
If you post or comment something illegal under german law you can be fined by the police.
I don't know of any immigration critical pages that are civil that got permanently disabled. I reported a page for holocaust denial (illegal in Germany) that got removed after a short period of time but as long as you are civil you are fine. Right wing publication and parties still have their pages.
This sounds a bit drama-queeny. She manages to seamlessly blend workplace sexism with product failures and other complaints all in a few sentences. To me that sounds like a broad swipe at her employer, the details and truth of which are far from conclusive based on her words alone.
It's not an easy topic to sum up neatly, but sexist allegations often have an unjustified momentum. Joining dots and drawing conclusions about co-worker and manager intent, when often the explanation is quite different.
For example, the first time someone complains about a discrepancy, it may be ignored not because the complainer was a woman, but that it was the first complaint. When others start to complain about the same thing, action is more likely to happen. A woman seeking evidence of sexism in the workplace will ignore the sensible explanation, and hurry to point the finger: "you ignored my complaint because I'm a woman".
Cognitive bias in the workplace is unfortunately the more likely story, less interesting as it may be. I enjoy a good "what did FB do wrong now" article, but I can't swallow this one.