Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News

Re:Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conserva... by nashashmi on Monday May 09, 2016 @12:42PM (#11661159)

> it's news feed algorithm to promote one candidate ... would be its prerogative under the First Amendment

As long such practices are declared.

People tend to look at "what's trending" in an effort to optimize/manipulate their content so that users would "trend" on it. The fact that FB was artificially eliminating stories gave false results to observers.

Another way of looking at this is if Nielson were to lower the rankings of shows it disagrees with and affecting the duration of those shows.

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Re:Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conserva... by bobwaycott on Monday May 09, 2016 @01:35PM (#11661567)

Equally important, Facebook, through its contractor curators, was artificially adding stories, giving additional false results to observers.

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Re:Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conserva... by hyperpape on Monday May 09, 2016 @02:48PM (#11662122)

Nielsen makes specific claims about the meaning of its data to people who pay for that data, so it would be fraud for them to undermine those claims by manipulating the data. I doubt Facebook does anything similar.

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Re:Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conserva... by Karunamon on Monday May 09, 2016 @03:09PM (#11662290)

What about to the advertisers? If I were a well-funded news outlet with a conservative bias, and I spent money on Facebook, I'd be evaluating my legal options right about now...

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Re:Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conserva... by hyperpape on Monday May 09, 2016 @09:08PM (#11664565)

I'm not sure this is an issue either. The advertisers were buying advertisements, not space on a trending list.

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Re:Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conserva... by Karunamon on Tuesday May 10, 2016 @10:46AM (#11667562)

If they're reordering trends for ideological correctness, it's not a stretch to assume they're doing the same for other content.

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