Facebook has been taking heat for the past several weeks after reports from an anonymous former employee surfaced in April that alleged Facebook’s Trending Topics box, which highlights current events stories, hides stories from conservative news sites, while “injecting” stories from other media outlets into the feed.
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An inexperienced and unorganised team may have been controlling the now-controversial Trending Topics feature of Facebook, according to media reports.
Only rarely has Facebook, the media monolith that commands the eyeballs of some 1.65 billion people, faced the level and volume of scrutiny that it’s facing right now.
“The overall tenor, to me, felt like the Salem Witch Trial: ‘Facebook, you must admit that you are screwing us, because if not, it proves you are screwing us, ‘” he wrote.
But after meeting with Zuckerberg to assess how the company could improve its product to be more conservative-friendly, Beck left the Facebook meeting with his beliefs about the social media company intact – “that it was a good, if not ideal actor”. Facebook will often give general guidance, such as announcing last month that it had adjusted its programming to favor news articles that readers engage with deeply, rather than shallow quick hits, or saying that it would give priority to live Facebook Live videos, which it is also paying media companies, including The New York Times, to experiment with.
I looked around the room, I heard the complaints, I listened to the perspectives, and not a single person in the room shared evidence of any wrongdoing.
Already, former curators told the Post, Facebook treats the members of its editorial team as if they were disposable: hiring and firing en masse, keeping them on short-term contracts, ordering them not to tell relatives about their jobs or to interact with Facebook’s full-time, in-house staff. The country is 2% Mormon. So, over time, the company has crafted guidelines to promote “real news” – or at least more timely news – on the site.
Beck said he expected he would be criticized for his stand.
Furthermore, Glenn Beck was furious at his fellow conservatives for demanding more quota for conservative views and fewer people being hired from the IVY league. I think they are honest and they reached out and they want to resolve this.
Carlson said he did not know what Beck’s agenda was, unless he was either “looking to put his tanking Web properties up for sale or he just can’t help himself. He acted like he was auditioning to be Mark Zuckerberg’s manservant – it was awe-inspiring”, Carlson told Politico’s Hadas Gold. “I will be called a sellout”, he wrote.
I take Facebook at its word when it says it wasn’t manipulating Trending Topics – its business heavily incentivizes it not to operate that way.
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“My point was a simple one, which is diversity is deeper than ethnicity”, Carlson said. “That’s not diversity; it’s conformity”.
