Personally, I would rather read sources on the various extremes of the spectrum and make the choice of what to trust myself. The most neutral (in my mind) coverage of US Politics I can find is foreign media such as the BBC.
Curators would find less biased (read: not as sympathetic to the conservative viewpoint) sources for trending conservative topics, but they would not do the same for liberal topics. So I agree that it's best to find balanced journalism, but that should happen on both sides (conservative and liberal). If they only find less biased sources for conservative media, then that is in itself even more biased toward the liberal agenda. They were censoring or watering down the conservative view point from multiple angles.
Keep in mind this is a statement quoted by the curator summing up what s/he said they did over a long span of time. Their recollection of what they tended to do is not necessarily reality. They could be lying in that quote to try to soften what they did. And their quest to find something less biased means diddly given the bias across all news.
Example of trending "conservative news": Obama bans the phrase "Merry Christmas". E.g. http://www.redflagnews.com/headlines-2015/barack-obama-bans-...
So what do you call Vox and Rolling Stone? Do you really have such a simplistic view of the world, where half of America is a bunch of morons with no legitimate gripes? You are destroying America. You are spreading division and hatred instead of understanding and reasoned arguments. I wonder if you would say the same thing if you were commenting with your real name.
"Obama bans 'Merry Christmas'" would likely get far more clicks and trend more than "Obama said Happy Holidays yesterday". To me, the problem is in the headline writing, coupled with silly human behaviors and algorithms. Not sure how to solve that problem.
I think Gizmodo's headline on this story is a compelling example of what I'm talking about. "Facebook has a tool used by curators to modify the Trending News section" probably wouldn't get as many clicks.
The publishers of conservative news stories are not "an entire half of the voting spectrum", so that's not the issue in any case.
Meanwhile there is a real, concrete conspiracy by conservatives to actively suppress the truth, especially in the area of climate science. It would be hard to not notice that the conservative PM of Canada actually banned scientists from speaking to the public, or that Republicans in the USA are constantly trying to defund NOAA and NASA, or that the Republican-controlled 104th Congress of the US forbid the NIH from studying gun violence, among many other examples.
https://books.google.com/books?id=9iLHTFOQLGwC&pg=PA314&lpg=...
More concerning than trending news actually being curated news is learning that negative stories about Facebook were allegedly actively suppressed. Doublenotcool at all.
However, that there is "conservative news" and "liberal news" is even more bothersome. Especially that it's offered as something anyone should find to be acceptable as an idea at all.
> But we would have to go and find the same story from a more neutral outlet that wasn’t as biased.
This is delivered as if it is inherently a bad thing, when it most assuredly is not. When I come across a story about anything, I actively prefer to find it covered by a neutral outlet that isn't as biased. This is, to me, a good thing, and what news should be. News should be information about events. If I want opinionated and editorialized news, I'd go after an opinionated and editorialized source. They abound. That anyone who calls themselves a journalist would call out the suppression of "conservative news" or "liberal news", instead of calling out the elevation and coupling of inherent bias in reporting as the problem itself, strikes me as more than worrisome.
To my thinking, there is a difference between news that is of interest to [insert ideological group identification] and news that is delivered through the bias of [insert ideological group identification]. I would love it if there was a way to identify and filter news from a neutral outlet with less (ideally no) bias. I recognize that is largely impossible, as we cannot rid ourselves of our biases very easily. However, we can recognize our biases and seek to counterbalance them. We can also make attempts to actively omit them from news coverage. An outlet can report on facts.
That said, it appears this story highlights both: a biased suppression of news that is of interest to conservatives and news that is delivered through the lens of conservatively biased opinion and sources. The former is entirely bad, as it actively omits information that a group would like to know. The second is far less onerous to me, as I personally would love it if there were algorithmic delivery of actual news from outlets that eschewed biased delivery and editorializing.
Edit: It is made clear in the article that part of the problem stems from Facebook's desire to compete with Twitter for real-time trending news. This is unsurprising, as should the outcome be to readers and users. Facebook created a tool to allow humans to modify news in the trending section that wasn't organically trending. Someone thought this would be a competitive net positive because it could allow Facebook curators to keep up with breaking news that was "all over Twitter". That Facebook hired curators, and that one or more of those curators then divulged information about this tool being used to subjectively inject or suppress stories seems entirely unsurprising. The tool obviously should not exist. Creating it was a very dumb move. Not militantly monitoring and correcting its misuse was even dumber.