If you're interested in Iran, you will probably see stuff about Iran that hardly anyone else sees.

I have zero interest in Iran and have never seen anything about it.

I also follow many people who posts news and information on Iran, and it's surprising none of them showed up on trending, except an article with intent of vilification. Seems unlikely.

Even if FB news is personalized, FB guideline indicates they can inject any news they want into this.

I noticed the same thing with the Yahoo News showing up on Yahoo email years ago and last time I checked continuing today. That source also rapidly became hawkish on foreign policy issues.

Your very small anecdotal evidence does not provide additional confirmation of the reported behavior.

I know. I worked on the ranking.

If you really care, it uses a GBDT and the newly released Facebook Flow.

Complex algorithms certainly do exhibit bias, and not only that - it's intentional. The whole point of a "trending" topic is to discriminate (i.e. inject bias) trendy topics from less trendy topics.

So you're talking about only adding the bias you want it to add - but I hope you can imagine that's an impossible cause to get 100% correct. There's no rigorous definition of trending; nor is there a rigorous definition of the topics to be selected from, nor are lots of other matters here rigorously defined. There's no way you're going to do better than some fuzzy algorithms trained on real data. Critically, that tends to mean real data generated by... biased humans.

Having humans involved will distort that process, thus meaning true trending does not exist. Well, on Facebook at least.

Facebook's employees repulse me.

What make it 'horrible' in your view? An implicit suggestion that 'trending' is mathematically deduced a la Reddit's 'Hot'?

Is there any method of validating this claim?

I don't think Zuckerberg is gonna call you and verify his employment.

All I can say, is why would I possibly lie to defend some minor product at a billion dollar corporation that I don't even work for anymore?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/12/facebook-...

When you believe in a conspiracy theory, hearing "why would I lie" doesn't change your mind, quite the opposite. It's also not true that there's "nothing that anyone can say that would prove that any system works as described". There's no general statement that will convince everyone, because everyone has personalized doubt about it.

It's certainly possible to assuage the fears of a conspiracy theorist - take their examples, give a credible, particularized explanation(not a vague "it's algorithmic", but describe the steps in detail), and show some goodwill to address their underlying fears. What you perhaps wanted to say was that you don't really care about convincing conspiracy theorists, which is fine, but very different.

edit: wording

It has incredible reach and is quite effective in claiming attention. I actually had to use uBlock's element hiding function to keep myself from reflexively looking at it and reading a bunch of news stories. I would be surprised if that wasn't true for many people, as that's what it was designed to do.

I guess asking for proof is an unreasonable thing in this case as I can't think of what would actually constitute proof. I do think that additional questions are reasonable in this case as the editorial control of the ranking is currently a topic of national interest. I'm not really sure what that means exactly in this conversation, but I have a vague feeling that things that are big should be examined more closely. That's not super fair to facebook compared with a traditional media company, but this thing is new and isn't really like our models of how media companies like newspapers and magazines work.

It's a little scary because of the power a couple headlines sprinkled here and there have when they're seen be a lot of people. Something that was nothing becomes a scandal, lies become truths in the public consciousness and can't be fixed (look at the antivax movement). Of course, they also have the power to do great justice as well.

I guess, my point after all this text is still that what you've built isn't minor, there will be and probably have been real world impacts from it. Those impacts stem from public trust in FB's editorial position. If the public doesn't trust FB to show unbiased stories, they interpret the state of the world vastly differently than if they trust FB. This is why I think it's reasonable to have questions, even if they may be somewhat pointed at times.

That said, I really appreciate the fact that you took the time to respond to this thread. Talking to the people directly involved is a great way to disabuse one of falsehoods. :)

EDIT:

For an example of a reason why people are interested in this capability, imagine a rouge FB employee were to push the following headline to everyone: "US Nuclear Arsenal Almost Fired at Russian City" The world would see this post made by one person, and the fact that it was pulled nearly immediately would be seen as evidence by some of a cover up and could add tension and possibly instigate an international incident. Until this generation died, you would have people all over the world that would believe that the US nearly nuked a Russian city without provocation.

We can argue about whether there's an ethical problem, but the assertion that there's any sort of legal problem seems completely arbitrary and partisan IMO.

"Fair and balanced" doesn't mean anything. Editorial control and algorithmic control are two different things.

> the assertion that there's any sort of legal problem seems completely arbitrary and partisan IMO.

I don't see any assertion that there's a legal problem in the parent.

It's also a meaningless distinction.

The point of contention is the bias, not whether the bias is imposed by an algorithm or by a human. People would still be complaining if Facebook had tweaked its algorithm to achieve identical outputs instead of employing humans to do it manually.

The truth seems to be somewhere in-between -- it was algorithmically generated and then the output was human-modified.

In general, I think the response to this post demonstrates the prevalence of magical thinking about computers, even by people who ought to know better. Bias is bias regardless of whether it's explicitly programmed behavior, emergent behavior from a carefully trained neural net, or enforced in human processes post-hoc. Distinguishing between these on the basis of where the behavior came from -- rather than whether or not there's a bias -- misses the point.

> I don't see any assertion that there's a legal problem in the parent.

The point of my post wasn't to contradict the parent post. There certainly are people who do claim it's a legal problem.

In other words, they are lying. 'Trending' should be calculated directly as topics of highest interest over all users. If it's not it's a manipulated figure.

Perhaps users on FB find it more interesting and they surface it. Why does news on FB have to mimic the mainstream media?

Many times we have to read the stories about the US as reported from other countries because the MSM misses them or decides they aren't important enough.

This is how the news media has operated in the US for almost all of its existence. I wouldnt be too concerned about it, just take news you read with a grain of salt.

[0] - https://www.facebook.com/business/help/community/question/?i...