{"id":181058,"date":"2016-10-14T19:29:00","date_gmt":"2016-10-15T00:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/10\/14\/the-computer-is-your-friend-3\/"},"modified":"2016-10-14T19:29:00","modified_gmt":"2016-10-15T00:29:00","slug":"the-computer-is-your-friend-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/10\/14\/the-computer-is-your-friend-3\/","title":{"rendered":"The Computer is Your Friend"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>Facebook was accused of having a liberal bias in its trending news by the flying monkey right wing.<\/p>\n

This might be true, but as Stephen Colbert noted, “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”<\/p>\n

Facebook’s response was to replace them with an algorythm, and this algorythm has been repeatedly punked<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The Megyn Kelly incident<\/a> was supposed to be an anomaly. An unfortunate one-off. A bit of (very public, embarrassing) bad luck. But in the six weeks since Facebook revamped its Trending system \u2014 and a hoax about the Fox News Channel star subsequently trended \u2014 the site has repeatedly promoted \u201cnews\u201d stories that are actually works of fiction. <\/p>\n

As part of a larger audit of Facebook\u2019s Trending topics<\/a>, the Intersect logged every news story that trended across four accounts during the workdays from Aug. 31 to Sept. 22. During that time, we uncovered five trending stories that were indisputably fake and three that were profoundly inaccurate. On top of that, we found that news releases, blog posts from sites such as Medium and links to online stores such as iTunes regularly trended. Facebook declined to comment about Trending on the record. <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not at all surprised how many fake stories have trended,\u201d one former member of the team that used to oversee Trending told the Post. \u201cIt was beyond predictable by anyone who spent time with the actual functionality of the product, not just the code.\u201d (The team member, who had signed a nondisclosure agreement with Facebook, spoke on the condition of anonymity.)<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

There was the thinly-sourced story, on Aug. 31, of a Clemson University administrator who kicked a praying man off campus<\/a>. (The sordid tale, aggregated by a right-wing outlet, has been soundly debunked<\/a> by the school.) <\/p>\n

The next week, on Sept. 8, Facebook promoted a breathless account of the iPhone\u2019s new and literally magical features<\/a>, sourced from the real news site Firstpost\u2019s satirical Faking News page. The day after, Facebook trended a news release from the \u201cAssociation of American Physicians and Surgeons\u201d \u2014 a discredited libertarian medical organization \u2014 as well as a tabloid story claiming that the Sept. 11 attacks were a \u201ccontrolled demolition<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

Last May, however, Facebook faced a torrent of high-profile accusations<\/a> about political bias on the Trending editorial team \u2014 so much so that, in the aftermath, the company decided to tweak the role humans play in approving Trending topics. On Aug. 26, Facebook laid off its editorial team and gave the engineers who replaced them a much different mandate when it came to vetting news. Where editors were told to independently verify trending topics<\/a> surfaced by the algorithm, even by cross-referencing \u201cGoogle News and other news sources,\u201d engineers were told to accept every trending topic<\/a> linked to three or more recent articles, from any source, or linked to any article with at least five related posts..<\/p>\n

The previous editorial team could also influence which specific news stories were displayed with each topic, rejecting the story selected by the algorithm if it was \u201cbiased,\u201d \u201cclickbait\u201d or irrelevant. Trending\u2019s current quality review team does not vet URLs. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The lessons learned here are two fold:<\/p>\n