A former Facebook engineer on algorithmic ranking for Facebook Trending
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Wait, they chose to be radically transparent AFTER they were denounced?
Kinda like Theranos, who's being really honest about the quality of their tests, AFTER they've been shown to be worthless?
I think I find that more believable than attempting to build an elaborate system for manipulating user opinions.
If anything, I think they are biasing the feeds in ways that garner clicks, like discussed here:
To me, this post by Jonathan Koren doesn't really get to the heart of the outrage by some observers. Yes, humans utimately need to be in the loop for content filtering, but the fact that they seemingly curate based on political agendas is the real controversy. Koren addressed the human part but ignored the political.
If we just isolate the "humans must oversee algorithms", I think it's easy to convince people of that. The user generation of stories and determining relevance looks to be a real-world variation of The Halting Problem. Therefore, you can't write a function f(x) where "x" is topics and "f(x)" returns "good story" or "bad story". You can't just let the algorithm run unattended. Hackers could exploit an unknown idiosyncrasy in the content algorithm and all of sudden, everybody's feed has "child pornography is awesome" stories in it. It doesn't matter if you take the latest cutting-edge text analysis algorithms from whitepapers and apply teraflops of Tensorflow on it, humans will still have to be in the loop to keep unexpected behavior from happening.
With that necessity of humans conceded, you then consider if the curators have abused their power into a pattern of bias. The other "guidelines" blog post[1] that he linked to doesn't actually address the real transparency that people would love to see: The list of (conservative) stories that curators sent to the bottom of the heap.
Unfortunately, making the list of "suppressed stories" transparent can also have the opposite effect of making them prominent... aka... The Streisand Effect.
[1]Justin Osofsky, VP Global Operations: "Facebook does not allow or advise our reviewers to discriminate against sources of any political origin, period. Here are the guidelines we use."
Outsiders skeptical analysis would be: Publicizing "internal guidelines" is not the same as publicizing the actual list of suppressed stories so people could judge for themselves if the "no politics" guidelines was followed.
Yes, but most people who are only sort of paying attention didn't catch the political part. So now when someone says "Facebook has an agenda against X!" the response - vocalized or not - becomes "no, they talked about that already."
From a PR perspective, it's not a bad move.
Towards actually addressing the issue, not so much.. especially since these published guidelines don't include (or at least I can't find), the blacklist numerous insiders have claimed exists, specifically around Twitter and Facebook itself being in Trending.
Some people would like to see the list of "conservative" stories that were sent to the bottom, for the amount of definitions of "conservative" equal to the amount of people who want to see that list. Others would like to see a similar list for "progressive" stories (again, a different list for every person), yet others would like to see a list of "neoreactionary" stories, and then some would want a list of "pro-peace anti-government cisgendered right-handed neuro-diversity-promoting anti-gun stories", or whatever.
This is politics, everyone wants more of what they like and less of what they don't like. Add to this the fact that some people are making money on their stories being shown, and you have a situation which is impossible to address by Facebook - and one they should not attempt to address at all. You can't satisfy everyone, and trying will only make things worse.
People need to suck it up. Political stories in media are one of the least reliable information sources in existence; I'd understand the outrage if it was about something actually valuable.
Why is this a controversy? Every news media outlet since the birth the United States (and probably world wide) has done this, it's youthful hubris to think otherwise. Especially in 'walled gardens' such as facebook.
whaaa?? That's exactly why you would NOT want humans to interfere.
"...because computers are incredibly stupid"
LOL and humans aren't? Who is this guy?
You obviously don't need humans reviewing the outputs of simple mechanisms, but as your mechanisms get more complex and opaque, the pretense that they are objective becomes ridiculous.
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