Facebook Trending News – Beyond Algorithms and Guidelines
- In Mathematics, Science & Technology
- 05:05 AM, May 14, 2016
- Suresh S Murthy
I had written here earlier how media uses a common technique called Agenda Setting to influence public opinion. The whole premise of the theory being: “Media does not tell us what to think, but rather what to think about.”
The way elections campaigns have been run in the recent past, it is evident that the political leaders use them heavily to share their stands on various issues, interact with their supporters and more often than not, use them to rake up controversies, all the while achieving a very important goal i.e. to keep trending. A classic example is the 2016 US presidential elections where candidates from both the sides have used every possible social media platform to make sure they are always in news. Thanks to social media, we now have the prospect of someone like Donald Trump standing a good chance to win the GOP nomination or Hillary Clinton getting a run for her money from someone like Bernie Sanders.
Social media giants like Facebook and Twitter have long outgrown their original mission of being alternative channels to socialize. They are now powerful tools by political parties to take the fight to the next level. Sample this excellent piece which outlines the usage of social media to use Agenda Setting in a political setup. The recent usage statistics of Facebook here shows that they have nearly 1.09 billion people log onto their site daily (DAU) for March 2016, which represents a 16% increase year over year. At 1.49 billion, Facebook has more monthly active users than WhatsApp (500 million), Twitter (284 million) and Instagram (200 million)—combined. This report also shares another interesting statistic: One in five page views in the United States occur on Facebook.
When the reach of Facebook is so huge, it obviously provides excellent opportunity to monetize the traffic it gets. Apart from regular marketing opportunities for companies, it also offers a great platform for political parties to reach out to their voter base. If people don’t turn up at rallies, sure they will definitely tune into Facebook! Once you have them tuned in, it’s a matter of time you have their attention towards news that’s trending. This is a very lethal combination since the users on Facebook might not actually login to check trending news in the first place.
A recent story published by Gizmodo revealed that ex Facebook workers claimed that the curators of its Facebook Trending news often suppressed the stories which were of interest to conservative groups in the US. Ever since Gizmodo published this piece, it has caused sharp response from Facebook’s Tom Stocky, VP Search at Facebook. In his response Tom Stocky categorically denied any such allegations of suppressing news which might have been of interest to a particular group. In his defense the Tom Stocky mentioned in his post: “Popular topics are first surfaced by an algorithm, then audited by review team members to confirm that the topics are in fact trending news in the real world and not, for example, similar-sounding topics or misnomers.”
The allegations by former workers who worked on the review team of Trending News have shared concrete evidence of stories which have been suppressed in the past. They also alleged that they were also asked to ‘inject’ storied into Trending News, even though they weren’t really trending. Some of the suppressed news include the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users. Another former employee said, “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.”
A recent interview aired on CBS news with Gizmodo Editor, Michael Nunez, where he talks about failed attempts by Gizmodo to solicit a response from Facebook about this issue. He said that failure to get any kind of response from Facebook in spite of repeatedly reaching out to them did make him suspicious about the whole episode. He claimed that there might be more to this story that what Facebook claims. Another important point made by Michael in the interview brings up an issue related to what’s easy to write about compared to what needs more expertise and deeper understanding. So a story about Kim Kardashian might be easy to trend against something that’s more nuanced! That for me is bias!!
In light of the above allegations, one begins to wonder how different is an influential social media platform different from Media outlets which are open about their bias. With its ever increasing user base, is it also easy to manipulate views and public opinion since it does involve human interaction while deciding which articles to trend? If there is huge money to be made what makes these companies play neutral?
I don’t think this phenomenon of meddling with the Trending topics is just limited to Facebook. Sometime back in India, there were allegations against Twitter India of removing some trending hash tags. One of commentators in the link states: “But this happened within a second! I happened to witness it; I was going back and forth between Rahulroars and pappumeows. Both had around 27.7K tweets and then all of a sudden, just disappeared from the list! Not 2nd place, not 3rd, just disappeared from top trends list. The 2nd place now is DDvsKKR which just has around 13K tweets.”
Where does this leave us, the readers who look for unbiased news to go then? Well, I believe that like the main stream media outlets which have a particular political inclination, even the social media platforms are also biased. They are biased in a different that whatever can bring more traffic wins and makes it to trending news. If you have enough resources to make enough noise about a topic on the internet, you win! At the end of the day, they are profit making companies operating to maximize their profits and making the most out of the internet traffic. So one must be careful about what news he/she consumes and from where. Take everything you read, with a pinch of salt. Don’t outsource your thinking!
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