![]() Instead, it just sits there, day in day out, totally dictating the content seen by more than a billion users of the biggest social network in the world. It will never be fired and decide to speak out about its decisions under the cloak of anonymity. The algorithm that drives it makes just as many editorial choices as the trending topic curators, but you can’t interview it to ask why. With the news feed, there’s no such luck. It’s an opaque system.Įxcept, of course, that we can speak to former curators of trending topics to find out what they did and didn’t post. There’s no reports feeding back why a curator decided to place or leave a story. What seems so disturbing about the alteration of trending topics is that the sites which were kept off the list had no way of knowing that they had even had a chance. Say what you like about moderation, though: at least you can see it happening. ![]() And even the best-paid highly skilled employees would have trouble drawing a consistent plan of action out of Facebook’s vague attempts at drawing up community standards.įacebook’s news feed was born in 2006, when the social network was growing into a global phenomenon. The work, often outsourced to companies like Manila-based contractor TaskUs, is performed with little remuneration or training. The company’s moderation team is notorious for its heavy-handed approach to topics like nudity, even as it also gets slated by governments worldwide for not removing and reporting content glorifying terrorism rapidly enough.īut being a community moderator at Facebook is a thankless task. Don’t believe me? Try to post a picture of Aboriginal women in traditional dress – that is, topless – on your Facebook feed and see how long it lasts. The jewel in Facebook’s crown is a hotbed of censorship. If Thune is outraged about stories not appearing on trending topics – a small sidebar which has an unclear influence on web traffic, fails to shape discussion, and is buried on mobile devices – wait until he finds out about the news feed. That hasn’t stopped outrage at the report reaching the highest levels: Republican Senator John Thune spoke out on Tuesday, asking the site to explain itself. Facebook has an entire team of writers working on these statements, according to a report from Gizmodo, and those writers are apparently encouraged to focus on mainstream news sites such as the BBC and CNN over fringe right-wing outlets like Breitbart or Newsmax.įacebook, for its part, denies censoring trending topics, saying that it wouldn’t even be “technically feasible” to do what the whistleblower alleged. “Quebec, Canada: Parts of Province Experience Snowfall, Report Says”īut no. Just try to post a picture of Aboriginal women in traditional dress The output of the feature is so bad that I and many others assumed it must be entirely algorithmic: how else would you end up with bizarre gnomic statements like this, taken verbatim from the “science and technology” section of my feed today: Facebook is a hotbed of censorship. We recommend that you remove the articles that are labeled with the breaking news indicator from your paywall so that people are able to read the content, whether it's on Instant Articles or your mobile website.The most surprising thing about Facebook’s trending stories isn’t that the human editors behind them occasionally exercise their own judgement in which stories they do or don’t link to it’s that even with humans working directly on the feature, it’s still awful. You will be able to edit the post that has the breaking news indicator on it (for example, to change the headline), although the breaking news timestamp will remain tied to the original time it was posted. Publishers have a cap of one breaking news indicator allocated per day, which they can use on any content they post, plus an extra five indicators to use at will throughout the calendar month. The content types eligible to use the indicators are Instant Articles, article links posts and Facebook Live video broadcasts. The indicator will also appear when content is shared from News Feed. This will allow Page followers to see a 'Breaking News' indicator on content in News Feed. Publishers can label content as breaking news through a Facebook Composer and some third party platforms. The indicator helps publishers quickly communicate urgent news and build audience loyalty through breaking news coverage while helping people identify the most important news stories on Facebook. The breaking news indicator is a label that appears next to important and developing news stories in News Feed.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |