The irony of Facebook’s Trending controversy
Facebook is receiving a huge amount of criticism for allegedly biasing the news via the empowerment of a team of human curators to make editorial decisions, as opposed to relying on what was previously thought to be an algorithm; it is an algorithm, though—the algorithm that powers the News Feed, with the goal of driving engagement — that is arguably doing more damage to our politics than the most biased human editor ever could. The fact of the matter is that, on the part of Facebook people actually see—the News Feed, not Trending News—conservatives see conservative stories, and liberals see liberal ones. . . Indeed, one could make the argument that an authoritative news module from Facebook would actually be a civil benefit.