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Today in the Can’t Make This Shit Up Department:
Ars Technica, Aug 2016
"Earlier this year, Facebook denied criticisms that
its Trending feature was surfacing news stories that were biased against
conservatives. But in an abrupt reversal, the company fired all the human
editors for Trending on Friday afternoon, replacing them with an algorithm that
promotes stories based entirely on what Facebook users are talking about.
Within 72 hours, according to the Washington Post, the top story on Trending
was about how Fox News icon Megyn Kelly was a pro-Clinton "traitor"
who had been fired (she wasn't).
…
"There were so many problems with this story,
ranging from plagiarism to falsity, that even a fairly simple-minded robot
editor should have caught them. The Trending algorithm is clearly not ready for
prime time, or maybe Facebook is just trying to redefine what it calls "a
breadth of ideas and commentary about a variety of topics."
So, first, we don’t trust humans to give us information
because they’re biased. We put it in the hands of the computers instead. Then
we realize that since the computers are only doing what we are doing, they
can’t be trusted either. … All Hail.
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