Hacker News Reader

That's not the definition of bias, in either the colloquial or statistics sense.

A platform promoting one side of the political spectrum over another is not bias? There's no deliberation needed to meet the definition of bias. Every person have unconscious biases, and any structural system, including algorithms that promote content on social media can have unconscious biases as well. Simply stating that it's not bias does not cut it for me.

OK, I admit it's not unequivocally not bias. It could be bias. I would just say there could be other explanations, such as a different ratio between non-politician activists to politicians on either side of the isle and how each slice of the pie tends to monopolize limited attention bandwidth.

If three political tweets by Lebron James are algorithmically boosted, and three political tweets by Ted Cruz are boosted, I wouldn't call that bias necessarily even though the metric being studied did.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com