This is why Iāve abandoned Facebook for my news, and only read Buzzfeed now. Iām currently deep in to a story about seventeen different vegetable side dishes. Number seven, Iām told, will be a real surprise.
In all seriousness though. Iād be surprised if Facebook hadnāt been manipulating the news feed.
Iām actually annoyed that they donāt suppress more of the topics that show up. Despite having once put effort into saying āI donāt care about thisā on anything relating to pop culture like Bieber or the Kardashians or some fight between musical artists I donāt know or listen to, those types of topics still pop up regularly.
And the only reason Iām on Facebook is because friends and family were too entrenched to move to something else when better options arose!
/rant
OMG the Drudge report was banned as a news source? But they have such great journalistic integrity!!
āSHOCK: McCAIN VOLUNTEER ATTACKED AND MUTILATED IN PITTSBURGH - āBā carved into 20 yr old Womanās Faceā
Woman Names Bill Clinton Father Of Son In Shocking Video Confession
Former Facebook staff say they routinely manipulated trending news topics
Probably off-topic, and Iām not sure what this says about me, but when I saw the pic Rob posted with this story I immediately thought of goatse.
The āitās the algorithmā never made any sense, because FBās users are mostly mouth-breathing morons who prefer to pass around salacious and mostly false gossip - i.e. normal people. Youād hardly get any real news at all if you left it up to the users.
One time you got to see this happen was when Ferguson was all over Twitter (which on the other side of this tends to blow even minor news wildly out of proportion because they love being in a garment-rending frenzy) but Facebook was all Ice Bucket Challenge, apparently because FBās news department thought Ferguson might be too much of a downer or something. Profits suggest the FB approach might work better for the company, but Twitter makes so many other terrible choices itās hard to tell.
If it werenāt for the trending topics sidebar, I wouldnāt even know that Justin Bieber had a face tattoo. To find out that it is curated makes me sad for the people whose job that is.
Still waiting for a story about Facebook that makes me regret leaving.
Iām glad this wonāt play into the old ālibārul mediaā or āpersecuted xtianā tropes that are so fun to kick around these days. 
Me too, except I never joined.
Yeah, thatās the question Iām asking. Facebook has a pretty widely publicized initiative to cut down on fake stories, misinformation and the like, thatās no secret. Are these sites(Which, by strange coincidence, seem to be the more notoriously bullshit-filled sites like Brietbart) getting suppressed, or are they getting caught up in the larger effort to cut down on fake news and misinformation, because they publish a shitload of fake news and misinformation and their political affiliation never played into it. Itās a small distinction, but an important one. Because, letās not forget, bulllshit is bullshit, regardless of political affiliation, the stink doesnāt change depending on which side of the cow it falls to.
āManipulatedā is such an ugly word. We prefer āCuratedā.
In all seriousness, though, this seems like something that is more or less implied by the existence of the job that those staff were formerly doing.
If by ātrendingā you actually mean some statistical measure of how often a given link is posted, followed, etc. then why hire a bunch of journalism types to handle it? Thatās a clear job for one of your data-crunchers(who probably costs a lot more than the journalists; but will pay off fast once the algorithm comes up to speed).
If this was part of Facebookās play(which they have been making fairly aggressively) to try to get assorted media outlets to step into the walled garden, then the existence of a human editorial team makes a lot more sense; as does the fact that matters deemed newsworthy and stories-from-our-partners-rather-than-competing-websites might get the nod markedly more frequently than community opinion would suggest.
I suspect that part of my failure to be surprised or shocked is just down to āwell, of course facebook is manipulative and conniving, and reality has a liberal biasā but this just seems about as surprising, and about as non-horrifying, as discovering that āletters to the editorā represents a handpicked selection that is markedly less crazy than the editorās actual mailbag.
I donāt want to be the straw-postmodernist(which is why Iām only going to accuse you of ācommitting epistemic violence by privileging a hegemonic empiricism over other legitimate ways of knowingā in jest and because itās a fun phrase); but I get the depressing impression that being anti-bullshit is widely perceived as having an anti-conservative bias.
This isnāt to say that bullshit isnāt available in any political shade you prefer(indeed, itās sort of a defining characteristic that thereās bullshit to serve any cause so long as itās orthogonal to the truth); but it seems to be a lot easier to draw conservative fire by having the temerity to insist on fact-checking. Your fact checking may go completely unnoticed on the liberal side except by those serious people who read Mother Jones; but apathy is noticeably distinct from blowback.
This isnāt to say that bullshit isnāt available in any political shade
you prefer(indeed, itās sort of a defining characteristic that thereās
bullshit to serve any cause so long as itās orthogonal to the truth);
but it seems to be a lot easier to draw conservative fire by having the
temerity to insist on fact-checking. Your fact checking may go completely unnoticed on the liberal side except by those serious people who read Mother Jones; but apathy is noticeably distinct from blowback.
Iād say that times are a-changing on that one, despite how evergreen a topic Republicans being out of touch with reality is. For just one example of many, Iāve been shouted at(metaphorically, of course) on BB before for calling out notorious bullshit blog USUncut, who are literally just a political action group dressed in the skin of a news outlet, like some sort of Media Buffalo Bill. (Would you clickthrough on me? Iād clickthrough on me.) Not to mention called a shill(and far worse) on more occasions than I can count just by clearing misconceptions and misinformation among the left-wing people interested in the current election primaries. I shudder to think about how itāll be during the general, when itās people who actually disagree ideologically.
The issue is that with the rise of clickbait and fake news sites, people on the Left have figured out what the Right-Wing(and particularly right wing radio) have known for years - It doesnāt matter a fuck what you say, as long as it agrees with what people already think. Which in turn, has lead to an enormous rise in the left falling for fake news and misinformation.
Honestly, I think the problem goes deeper than merely fact-checking - itās media illiteracy, and lack of awareness about different outlets. You canāt fact check every bit of news you consume, thereās simply not enough hours in the day, so you pick news outlets to trust - but without some basic media literacy, you end up at places like USUncut because they agree with you ideologically, and therefore seem trustworthy even though theyāre not even an actual outlet. If someone lacks the tools to assess a media outlet for trustworthiness, or how to give their reportage appropriate weight, all the fact-checking in the world canāt save them - because their two primary tools for deciding if they should trust an outlet will be ideology and reputation.
For example, most people in this thread would pick The Intercept over Buzzfeed, right? One employs the famous snowden leaks journalist Glenn Greenwald, and they made big statements about Real Journalism, and they seem pretty left wing. The other publishes listicles and crappy entertainment content, so theyāre probably not very good.
Nope! Exactly backwards - the Intercept is a rudderless clusterfuck, Greenwald has been riding roughshod doing whatever the fuck he likes since they trade on his name recognition, and their reportage is often utter nonsense - like the time they reported that windows 10 was stealing your encryption keys, or that Hiram Saban owns The Onion and implying that heās ordering them to not make fun of Hillary Clinton(Which is so trivially debunked that it boggles the mind they not only published it, but updated it with a correction, but have not yet seen fit to retract).
Buzzfeed, on the other hand, has a stunningly well-rounded, well-funded and high-quality newsroom, with multiple Pulizer winners, some of the more respected journalists in the business, and over the last few years have been consistently producing some of the best news and investigative content out there, like uncovering massive problems in the UK police with unlawful searches, or the systematic abuse and neglect within Americaās largest Foster Care company, or how the US justice system has been putting domestic abuse victims behind bars, or the investigation of the financial malfeasance of senior officials within the NSA.
TL:DR - Ideology is a problem, and the right wing certainly has a disconnect with reality, but the underlying issue is less one of ideology than media illiteracy.
Maybe it says more about me but I assumed that was intentional.
The Fairness Doctrine ended in 1987, there is no responsibility of equal time, as demonstrated by Fox News and Limbaughās AM radio monopoly. Furthermore, if youāre depending of Facebook to get adequate information, youāre already a moron and a few articles wonāt help you.
