“What makes social media unique,” writes Mark Zuckerberg in defending Facebook against charges of an anti-conservative slant in its promotion of “trending” news stories, is that “we are one global community where anyone can share anything — from a loving photo of a mother and her baby to intellectual analysis of political events.” The ideal of a global community of unfettered sharers, all equal in their sharing ability, is “the core of everything Facebook is,” he continues. “Every tool we build is designed to give more people a voice and bring our global community together.”
What doesn’t cross Zuckerberg’s mind is that he is here expressing his own ideological bias, a bias toward a kind of My Little Pony cosmopolitanism that is at once soggy-minded and imperialist. It is a bias so thoroughgoing that he is unable to conceive of it as being a bias. Surely, no one could look at the pursuit of a global community, organized under the auspices of a business that seeks complete control over people’s attention, as anything other than an unalloyed good. Kumbaya, bitch.
While Facebook continues to deny any systematic skewing of its news highlights, it does acknowledge “the possibility of isolated improper actions or unintentional bias.” It places the blame squarely on humans, those notoriously flawed beings whom the company stresses it is striving to eliminate from its information-filtering processes. “We currently use people to bridge the gap between what an algorithm can do today and what we hope it will be able to do in the future,” Facebook’s top lawyer, Colin Stretch, explains in a letter to Congress. Stretch doesn’t bother to mention that an algorithm is itself a product of human effort and judgment, but one senses that the company is probably hard at work at developing an algorithm to write its headline-filtering algorithm and after that it will seek to develop an algorithm to write the algorithm that writes the headline-filtering algorithm. Facebook won’t rest until it’s algorithms all the way down.
In the meantime, the company is making itself more insular to protect it’s algorithmic virtue. “We will eliminate our reliance on external websites and news outlets to identify, validate, or assess the importance of trending topics,” writes Stretch. Potential “trending topics” will be identified solely through a software program monitoring activity on Facebook. The problem with the news outlets is that they still occasionally use humans to make editorial judgments and hence can’t be trusted to be bias-free. Facebook wants to insulate itself from journalism even as it seeks to dominate journalism.
Still, it’s hard not to feel a little sympathy for Facebook in its current predicament. The reason it had to bring in humans to sift through news stories in the first place was that its trend-tracking algorithm was overly reliant on — you guessed it — human judgment. The algorithm aggregated the judgments of Facebook members, as expressed through Likes, repostings, and other subjective actions, and that led to an abundance of crap in the trending feed. As The Guardian‘s Nellie Bowles put it, “Truly viral news content tends to be terrible.” The wisdom of the crowd, when it comes to picking news stories for wide circulation, is indistinguishable from idiocy. So Facebook needed to bring in (individual) human judgment to correct for the flaws in (mass) human judgment.
Humans: can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em.
I’m guessing that at this point Zuckerberg rues the day he gave a thumb’s-up to the Trending Topics section. Facebook’s News Feed, which is by far the social network’s most important and influential information feed, is infinitely more biased than the Trending Topics Feed, but in the News Feed “bias” goes by the user-friendly name “personalization” and so draws little ire. People are happy to have their own bias fed back to them. It’s when they see things that don’t fit their bias that they start getting irritated and complaining about “bias.”
Facebook’s mistake was to attempt to create a universal, one-feed-fits-all headline service. The company put itself in a no-win situation. Even if it were possible to create a purely unbiased news feed, a lot of people would still perceive bias in it. And most people don’t want an unbiased news feed, anyway — they just want to be able to choose their own bias. So here, if you’ll allow me to exercise my own jaundiced bias, is what I bet will happen. Once all the fuss dies down, the Trending Topics section, in its current universal form, will quietly be eliminated. In its place, Facebook will start offering a variety of news “channels” that will be curated, for a fee or an ad-revenue split, by media outlets like Fox News, or Politico, or Brietbart, or Huffington Post, or Vice, or Funny or Die, or what have you. Facebook members will be free to choose whichever channel or channels they want to follow — they’ll be able to choose their own bias, in other words — and Facebook will tighten its grip over news distribution while also getting a new revenue stream. Now that’s a win-win.
The best way to bring a global community together is by letting its members indulge their own biases. Just make sure you call it “personalization.”
Image: Keith.