Facebook Needs to Be an Open Book on News Feeds
Charges that workers at the social media giant manipulated story choices should deeply concern its users. Charges that workers at the social media giant manipulated story choices should deeply concern its users.
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In its response to the Gizmodo article, Facebook openly admitted its most insidious goal: “We will also keep looking into any questions about Trending Topics to ensure that people are matched with the stories that are predicted to be the most interesting to them, and to be sure that our methods are as neutral and effective as possible.”
Think about the contradictions in that statement. The most neutral filter would be no filter at all, but Facebook is intent on showing users the news that it thinks we want to see. Somehow the algorithms the company creates are supposed to take human bias out of the selection process so that the stories we are shown appear to be “naturally” chosen for us. But if you get your news from a variety of sources, you are much more likely to be exposed to perspectives that might challenge you, or with which you might disagree. With increasing numbers of people relying on Facebook as their sole source of news, and Facebook in turn only exposing them only to stories within their comfort zone, are we not creating a highly polarized world in which everyone is convinced that their perspective is the popular—maybe even the “correct”—one?
Of course, filtering is always going on. When I choose stories to cover on my progressive radio and television news show, I am filtering the news for my listeners and viewers. “The world is too complex for us to have direct access to all of the news,” said Jensen. Rather than demanding “unfiltered information,” he said, we should be asking, “Who’s doing the filtering and on what principles?”
Facebook does not answer those questions (my listeners and viewers know off the bat that the news they get on my show is viewed through my progressive lens). Instead, it feeds us vague-sounding pabulum about making “the world more open and connected,” while behind the scenes, highly educated, nameless, young people may be using secret algorithms to tweak our news this way or that. Rather than being open and connected, the company may well be fostering less openness and transparency and potentially greater political polarization.
In response to Gizmodo’s charges about Facebook, the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation has opened an inquiry into its practices. Of course, chances are that if Facebook had been charged with undermining progressive rather than conservative news, the GOP-dominated Senate would have ignored the story altogether. Still, as Jensen says, “If Facebook is doing something that it claims has a public benefit—they’re not just selling shoes; they’re selling us an experience that has to do with citizenship—there’s a demand for transparency that we should be making.”
Given that nearly a quarter of the global population actively uses Facebook, how might ordinary people wield our power to demand transparency? After all, Facebook is merely an empty shell without our online presence and interactions. Users have an inordinate potential for leverage over the company, even more so than we have over traditional media, given the interactive nature of the beast. If we start to think of Zuckerberg’s creation as a crucial tool that truly fosters democracy, perhaps we should perceive it as an electronic commons and reduce the demands of a capitalist, money-making model to a secondary or even oppositional role.
As Zuckerberg himself presciently said, “These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored.” Even he knows that the power to make demands of Facebook is in our hands.
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