Washington Post: The great irony of the tech blog Gizmodo’s revelation that Facebook’s trending topic curators weeded out stories about Facebook or about issues popular with conservatives is that Gizmodo’s story therefore won’t end up on Facebook’s list of trending topics. After all, the report, which suggests that the social media behemoth’s team filtered out stories on conservative topics from conservative sites, will most certainly be very, very popular with conservatives.
What we’re talking about here is that little box at the upper right of your Facebook page — the short list of news topics that are being discussed on Facebook at the moment. They’re clearly tailored to the user; as I write, mine include stories about New York (where I live) and politics, which I would assume that a surgeon in Dallas probably wouldn’t see. Since Facebook has one-sixth of the world using it every day, pretty much everything is being talked about to some extent. The company uses an automatic system (an algorithm) to surface what’s currently popular, and a team of staffers then further curates the list to tailor it to meet particular standards.
And there’s the problem. Gizmodo quotes several former curators suggesting that conservative news stories would be booted from the automatically generated list of trending stories for two reasons. One was if the story came from a conservative-leaning site like Breitbart or Newsmax, in which case curators were told to find the same story on a mainstream media site, if possible. The other was if the curator didn’t want to include the story or didn’t recognize the story as important. It’s hard to know the extent to which the latter judgments took place, but one of the former curators — a conservative — told Gizmodo, “I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news.”
That’s problematic, for obvious reasons. (Gizmodo notes that it’s not clear whether this is still happening, since the trending news algorithm is constantly being tweaked, and that it’s not clear if liberal news was similarly affected.) The bigger question is the extent to which Facebook overlays another filter on top of what you see — and the extent to which that can influence political decisions.
We already knew (even if we sometimes forget) that there are a lot of layers of filtration that occur before you see anything at Facebook.com. There’s the filtering that you yourself do, picking friends, clicking links, posting stuff to your wall. There’s the main Facebook algorithm, that puts things in your feed.
