Most of the stories appearing in the News Tab will be algorithmically sorted and ranked, Ms. Brown said. But she said training those algorithms to personalize content to people takes an enormous amount of data and time, which is why Facebook is hiring journalists to curate and surface some of the day’s most important and pertinent news stories.
Other tech giants have also pushed into online news publishing with an element of human curation. Apple, for example, has hired traditional journalists to edit and curate Apple News, its subscription news app. LinkedIn has also hired journalists to work on in-house editorial products.
Facebook’s News Tab will almost certainly attract the ire of critics across the political spectrum, many of whom believe the social network unfairly favors some political parties and viewpoints over others.
In Congress and the White House, conservatives have repeatedly alleged — without evidence — that tech companies like Facebook and Google have suppressed speech from Republicans. Last month, Representative Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat from Hawaii who is running for president, sued Google, saying the company had infringed on her free speech when it briefly suspended her campaign’s advertising account after the first Democratic debate in June.
The genesis of the bias allegations followed a Gizmodo article in 2016 concerning Trending Topics, a discontinued Facebook product that surfaced some of the most popular news and trends to users, and was curated by a mix of algorithms and contract journalists. The article quoted anonymous sources who worked on Trending Topics, claiming that some workers routinely “suppressed” conservative stories from the list.
But a Times investigation found that the claims were largely unsubstantiated. Most of the problem with Trending Topics had to do with hiring young, inexperienced curators for the site.
Facebook has said it hopes to release a test of News Tab before the end of the year.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/technology/facebook-news-humans.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
Speak Your Mind
You must be logged in to post a comment.