Facebook admits
Today, Facebook admitted (well, partially admitted) that, “it’s impossible to fully exclude the possibility that, over the years of the feature’s existence, a specific reviewer took isolated actions with an improper motive.” Uh, okay?
A few weeks ago, iroots.org reported that Facebook employees had suppressed news items that included “Rand Paul” in their trending news section. This was during the time when Sen. Paul won the CPAC straw poll and near the time when he announced his presidential bid. Now, I’m not saying Facebook is completely to blame for Rand Paul’s presidential bid essentially fizzling out in a few short months, but headlines like this certainly couldn’t have hurt.
Washington (CNN) Sen. Rand Paul won the Conservative Political Action Conference straw poll for the third year in a row on Saturday, with 25.7% of the vote, event organizers announced Saturday at the National Harbor, Maryland, Confab.
It’s important to note that the reporter of the original story is in possession of documents given to him by whistleblowers that were working deep within Facebook. Their weak partial admission doesn’t even include a full investigation of the full time frame. In other words, this story isn’t over yet.
Facebook did not investigate a large portion of the time referenced in our reports (esp. critical timeframe in 2014) https://t.co/geCvmhmv31
— Michael Nuñez (@MichaelFNunez) May 24, 2016
The timeframe that Facebook investigated is vague in the company’s report. The trending news section launched in January, 2014. It appears that Facebook was only able to access data dating back to December of that year. “We could not reconstruct reliable data logs from before December 2014, so were unable to examine each of the reviewer decisions from that period,” the report says.
The report says “rates of ‘boosting,’ ‘blacklisting,’ and accepting topics have been virtually identical for liberal and conservative topics” but the report notes that the analysis only spanned the last 90 days. The former curators Gizmodo interviewed worked for Facebook from mid-2014 to December 2015.
“Despite the findings of our investigation, it is impossible to fully exclude the possibility that, over the years of the feature’s existence, a specific reviewer took isolated actions with an improper motive,” the report says. More from Gizmodo.
Rand Paul supporters (and all conservatives) are right to be pissed. But let’s not become social justice warriors like some Republicans calling for big mommy government to make it better.
No doubt, it’s hard to see an answer right now. Facebook is ridiculously ubiquitous. Let’s be honest, this blog would get almost no traffic without it. Facebook is a business and a product. They have every right to be biased. This is just a golden opportunity to make conservatives and thoughtful liberals aware of the truth. Get your news elsewhere and—now, take a deep breath—Facebook is not your identity.