Facebook and News Bias

The big controversy this week in the tech world followed a Gizmodo report that Facebook has been deliberately suppressing certain Conservative-leaning articles from its news feed. The report claims that a former reporter who worked on Facebook’s trending news team “says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.”

Facebook denies these allegations outright, claiming that such biased curating would be counterintuitive, and would undermine their service to a users worldwide. Said Will Cathcart, director of product management for the News Feed, “We want this to show you what you’re most interested in… We’re not interested in adding our point of view — we actually don’t think that works for a billion people.”

The story is significant because it raises questions not only about bias in news, but bias in curating biased news. Whether objectivity should be the rule in news reporting—whether it’s even possible—is a hotly debated topic. But now we’re talking about objectivity in “curating” news that is presumably subjectively reported already. And how many “sources” are we really getting our news from—when those sources are often distilled through an aggregator like Facebook? It’s enough make your head spin.

In an increasingly robotic, automated world, one has to ponder: what really is the alternative to human editorial influence? Soon enough, it may simply be a complex algorithm that is telling us what it wants us to think. Or maybe that day has already arrived.