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A Small Group of Journalists Control and Decide What Should Trend On Facebook (gizmodo.com) 90

An anonymous reader writes: According to five former members of Facebook's trending news team, "news curators" as they're known internally, Zuckerberg and company take a downright dim view of the media industry and its talent. In interviews with Gizmodo, these former curators described grueling work conditions, humiliating treatment, and a secretive, imperious culture in which they were treated as disposable outsiders. After doing a tour in Facebook's news trenches, almost all of them came to believe that they were there not to work, but to serve as training modules for Facebook's algorithm." "We choose what's trending," said one former news curator. From personal experience I can share a similar incident. An Indian outlet extensively wrote about flaws in Facebook's Free Basics. Few days later, "Ban [that outlet's name]" was trending on Facebook. Clicking on it, for the first few hours, literally didn't return any relevant result, as nobody was talking about it, and no media outlet had written about it. It was after more than a day or so after this fabricated item kept trending that some other outlets started to write about it. (That's common in the media industry: writing about trending topics.) In the past, we've also seen Facebook employees ask whether the company should do anything to stop Donald Trump from becoming the president.
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A Small Group of Journalists Control and Decide What Should Trend On Facebook

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  • So, a bunch of "news curators" (journalists???) take a job with Facebook and fail to understand who and what Facebook is, which is not a purportedly "unbiased" news source or service such as a major newspaper or other news gathering entity, and after discovering what just about everyone with a brain understands about Facebook, they are now but-hurt? As far as âoean Indian outletâ that pissed Facebook off, well, you know? Facebook is a company that can do what they want with their product.

    After doing a tour in Facebook's news trenches, almost all of them came to believe that they were there not to work, but to serve as training modules for Facebook's algorithm."

    Well, ye

  • danger danger (Score:5, Insightful)

    by supernova87a ( 532540 ) <kepler1&hotmail,com> on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @03:18PM (#52038587)
    We'd better be careful as a society about slowly eroding the value of in-depth, not-yet-trending or popular journalism that creates significant public value, but is hard to recognize while it's being done.

    The kind of respected journalism that takes time and effort to research and write, where the journalist/researcher/writer don't have the promise of instant reward, and maybe are facing significant personal risk to find the story that takes down an injustice, powerful person, or entrenched interest.

    If you don't watch out diligently, the funneling of our popular consciousness through these most-votes-win, popular-for-today, let's-not-offend-anyone, feel-good-only channels will result in us becoming more and more of a stupidity contest where the fastest, easiest, cheap thrills and sugary taste wins and we have no cultural backbone worth respecting at all.
    • Re:danger danger (Score:4, Interesting)

      by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @03:34PM (#52038747)
      >> respected journalism that takes time and effort to research and write, where the journalist/researcher/writer don't have the promise of instant reward, and maybe are facing significant personal risk

      That's already pretty much gone. When's the last time you saw/heard a journalist even wanting to ruffle feathers at a presidential press conference?
      • When's the last time you saw/heard a journalist even wanting to ruffle feathers at a presidential press conference?

        https://youtu.be/OM3Z_Kskl_U

        • When's the last time you saw/heard a journalist even wanting to ruffle feathers at a presidential press conference?

          https://youtu.be/OM3Z_Kskl_U

          Raw Video: Iraqi Journalist Throws Shoe at Bush
          Associated Press

      • by umghhh ( 965931 )
        I think that is a great exaggeration. Bias, lies, ignorance were always part of journalism as people doing it are humans and these are characteristics of human apes. Yet throughout the years there were journalists that fought against the mainstream if they saw a necessity. As there were heroes of journalism there were also losses - that is what happens when you bark at big gorilla. What is changing is that instead of many midsized news organizations we start having only few really big ones and the rest is j
    • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      We'd better be careful as a society about slowly eroding the value of in-depth, not-yet-trending or popular journalism that creates significant public value, but is hard to recognize while it's being done.

      The kind of respected journalism that takes time and effort to research and write, where the journalist/researcher/writer don't have the promise of instant reward, and maybe are facing significant personal risk to find the story that takes down an injustice, powerful person, or entrenched interest.

      If you d

    • The Onion's Real Time News Show [youtube.com]
  • “When news is as fast as everything else on Facebook, people will naturally read a lot more news,” he said in a Q&A last year, adding that he wants Facebook Instant Articles to be the “primary news experience people have.”

    Control [twimg.com]

  • >> former curators described grueling work conditions, humiliating treatment, and a secretive, imperious culture in which they were treated as disposable outsiders

    Welcome to work, where "consistency of product" (e.g., the content you crap out) is key. The average salary for a "content curator" appears to be $43K: not bad for a liberal arts major - beats serving coffee, right?
  • An Indian outlet extensively wrote about flaws in Facebook's Free Basics. Few days later, "Ban [that outlet's name]" was trending on Facebook. Clicking on it, for the first few hours, literally didn't return any relevant result, as nobody was talking about it, and no media outlet had written about it. It was after more than a day or so after this fabricated item kept trending that some other outlets started to write about it.

    Emily Kane: Really, Charles. People will think...

    Drunk Charles Zuckerberg Kane: ...what I tell them to think!

    • by PCM2 ( 4486 )

      Reporter: I'm the one who's got to do the singin'! I'm the one that gets the razzberries! Why don't you leave me alone?

  • And? Stop using Facebook (FB), at least for your news. FB is not the only place to find news on the internet, and its far easier to find news than bothering with FB's trending news swamp of celebrities. I suspect Gizmondo is allowing its own political biases to override the facts here; thank goodness we have innumerable news sources beyond FB and Gizmondo. Use Google Search.
  • Does that surprise anybody? The whole thing is a commercial simulation of a real social network, aiming at maximized profits and making all its users (and even additional people that never agreed to anything) their product.

  • Why shouldn't what is "trending" be a strictly statistical and or machine learning data driven result with no humans gumming up the works?

If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts. -- Albert Einstein

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