The Washington Examiner’s Kristen Soltis Anderson said Tuesday that she wants Facebook to explain how much human judgment goes into decisions about what stories Facebook users can see, after a former news aggregator said the company purposefully tries to downplay conservative news.
Anderson is one of several conservatives who will attend a meeting with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday to discuss those charges.
“What I want to hear from Mark Zuckerberg is, and what I want to hear from the Facebook team, is what do they think is the appropriate role of sort of human judgment in this process of role of telling people what other stories they should be reading,” Anderson said on MSNBC Tuesday morning. “It sounds a lot more like a traditional newsroom. That’s fundamentally different than a data-driven algorithm though, which is what I think a lot of people rely on Facebook to do.”
Related Story: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2591430
“In this case, most of the folks doing this job, it’s reported, are … probably young kids who just graduated from really good colleges,” Anderson added. “Maybe they don’t think they have intentional biases, but maybe choosing stories that are of more personal interest to them and leaving conservative stories out.”
Related Story: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2591067
A report last week suggested that Facebook used a slanted editorial process to determine what news and media outlets appear in its “trending news” bar. Though the process is determined partially by an algorithm, the company also employs “news aggregators” to fill in the gaps.
Facebook has said there is no bias against conservatives, but many agree that the company needs to offer more details about the process in light of the public charges.
“I think whether it’s Facebook or whether it’s Google, you have the most powerful companies in the world that make their algorithms basically state secrets,” said MSNBC host Joe Scarborough. “When you try to talk to them and get input into how they determine things are, whether it’s on Facebook or on Google, they said that’s a [trade] secret … Again, the more powerful they become the more of a responsibility they have to explain publicly what they do privately.”
