Allegations that Facebook censors conservative news from its “trending topics” widget has drawn condemnation from the right. The response would have been just fine had it included political complaints and not a government inquiry.
John Thune, who chairs the Senate’s Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, wrote Mark Zuckerburg in a letter dated Tuesday to demand answers from the company about the manner in which its employees populate the trending feature.
“If Facebook presents its Trending Topics section as the result of a neutral, objective algorithm, but it is in fact subjective and filtered to support or suppress particular political viewpoints, Facebook’s assertion that it maintains a ‘platform for people and perspectives from across the political spectrum’ misleads the public,” Thune wrote.
Lawmakers may as well call out the New York Times on official stationary, too. The Gray Lady purports to report “all the news that’s fit to print”. If that’s truly the case, it would be no stretch to say that this motto “misleads the public” itself. Please, insulate your shock upon reading the following: Outside the opinion pages, the Times’s definition of “fit” does not include even a glance of conservative perspective.
Just ask the former public editor of the thing. Daniel Okrent wrote in July 2004:
That’s just the way they do business. Facebook (and to a frenetic extent, Twitter) presents a buffet of news headlines, and the website’s trending section is a sort of A1 of the Internet. As the company’s executive in charge of trending topics, Tom Stocky, said late Monday, that process includes a combination of algorithmic and human control. The Wall Street Journal writes:
“Reviewer” — sounds like another word for “editor”.
Those people have been exercising questionable news judgment for years, all without official inquiry. There’s a simple explanation why: Government is not on a newspaper’s editorial staff, neither as editor-in-chief nor ombudsman.
