{"id":7000,"date":"2016-05-24T09:35:23","date_gmt":"2016-05-24T15:35:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=7000"},"modified":"2016-05-24T16:30:07","modified_gmt":"2016-05-24T22:30:07","slug":"the-future-of-facebook-is-more-bias-not-less","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=7000","title":{"rendered":"The future of Facebook is more bias, not less"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"grain\"<\/a><\/p>\n

“What makes social media unique,” writes<\/a>\u00a0Mark Zuckerberg in defending Facebook against charges of an anti-conservative slant\u00a0in its promotion of “trending” news stories, is that “we are one global community where anyone can share anything\u00a0\u2014\u00a0from 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.”<\/p>\n

What doesn’t cross Zuckerberg’s mind is that he is here expressing his own ideological\u00a0bias, a bias toward\u00a0a kind of\u00a0My Little Pony cosmopolitanism that is at once soggy-minded and imperialist. It is a bias so thoroughgoing\u00a0that he\u00a0is unable to conceive of it\u00a0as being a bias. Surely, no one could look at\u00a0the pursuit of a global community, organized under the auspices\u00a0of a business that seeks complete\u00a0control over people’s attention, as anything other than an unalloyed good. Kumbaya, bitch.<\/p>\n

While Facebook\u00a0continues to deny any systematic skewing of its news highlights, it does\u00a0acknowledge<\/a> “the possibility of isolated improper actions or unintentional bias.” It places the\u00a0blame\u00a0squarely on\u00a0humans, those notoriously flawed beings whom the company stresses it is striving\u00a0to eliminate from its information-filtering processes. “We currently use people to bridge the gap between what an algorithm can do today and what we\u00a0hope it will be able to do in the future,” Facebook’s top lawyer, Colin Stretch,\u00a0explains in a letter<\/a> to Congress. Stretch\u00a0doesn’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\u00a0algorithm.\u00a0Facebook won’t rest until it’s\u00a0algorithms all the way down.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, the company is making itself\u00a0more 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\u00a0“trending topics” will be identified solely through a\u00a0software program\u00a0monitoring 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.<\/p>\n

Still, it’s hard not to feel a little sympathy for Facebook\u00a0in its current\u00a0predicament. 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 \u2014 you guessed it\u00a0\u2014\u00a0human judgment. The algorithm aggregated the judgments of\u00a0Facebook members, as expressed through Likes, repostings, and other subjective\u00a0actions, and that led to an abundance of crap in the trending feed.\u00a0As The Guardian<\/em>‘s Nellie Bowles put it<\/a>, “Truly viral news content tends to be terrible.” The wisdom of the crowd, when it comes to picking\u00a0news 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.<\/p>\n

Humans: can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em.<\/p>\n

I’m guessing that at this point Zuckerberg rues the day he gave a\u00a0thumb’s-up\u00a0to the Trending Topics section. Facebook’s News Feed, which is by far\u00a0the\u00a0social network’s most important\u00a0and influential information feed, is infinitely\u00a0more biased than the Trending Topics Feed, but in the News Feed “bias” goes by the user-friendly name\u00a0“personalization” and so draws little\u00a0ire. 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\u00a0about “bias.”<\/p>\n

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\u00a0create a purely unbiased news feed, a lot of people would still\u00a0perceive bias in it. And most people don’t want an unbiased news feed, anyway \u2014 they just want to be able to choose their own bias.\u00a0So here, if you’ll allow me to exercise\u00a0my own jaundiced bias, is what I bet\u00a0will happen.\u00a0Once all the fuss<\/a> dies down, the\u00a0Trending 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\u00a0have you. Facebook members will be free to choose whichever channel or channels they want to follow \u2014 they’ll be able to choose their own bias, in other words \u2014 and Facebook will tighten its grip over news distribution while also getting a new revenue stream. Now that’s\u00a0a win-win.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

Image: Keith<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“What makes social media unique,” writes\u00a0Mark Zuckerberg in defending Facebook against charges of an anti-conservative slant\u00a0in its promotion of “trending” news stories, is that “we are one global community where anyone can share anything\u00a0\u2014\u00a0from a loving photo of a mother and her baby to intellectual analysis of political events.” The ideal of a global community […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7000"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7021,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7000\/revisions\/7021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}