Basically FB has fired the team that used to put manually put that trending sidebar together. This followed that report that suggested the team were too "liberal" and weren't including right-leaning stories in the trending section.
Instead, FB has gone for an algorithmic approach, but so far with fairly disastrous results. There was a fake Megyn Kelly story a couple of weeks ago, when they first introduced it (more on that here: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/29/facebook-fires-trending-topics-team-algorithm), and now it seems to be full of click-bait and/or ultra-trivial rubbish. There's no filter, and whatever people are sharing goes in regardless of accuracy or importance. Of the ten stories I see on the main tab right now, only one has actual proper news value. The rest are at best "entertainment news." The other FB story at the moment is their censorship of the "Napalm girl" Pulitzer prize-winning photo of Kim Phuc taken during the Vietnam War. FB considers this nudity, and has prevented a Norwegian newspaper and Prime Minister of Norway from publishing it without blurring or pixilation! (Story here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37318031). I think the comment at the foot of the BBC story really gets to the heart of the matter. FB considers itself a technology company as opposed to a media company, and therefore works in a different way. But like it or not, with so many people getting their news from FB, they are indeed a media company. And they therefore have to take responsibility for both propagating nonsense stories and censorship according to their own rules. Adam On Fri, Sep 9, 2016 at 4:57 PM, PGage <pga...@gmail.com> wrote: > Something has been happening with the stories pushed on the home page of > my Facebook. This has never been a source of the most trusted news stories, > but at least in the past there was some semblance of newsiness to them. But > for the last few days (or maybe longer, I don't read this that often) the > stories have been the worst kind of third rate blog drool. The one pasted > below is from this morning about Meghan McCain and is typical, from > something called prntly.com. > > I don't have a big enough sample to tell if they are all or mostly > hyper-conservative in nature - is this some kind of make-up for the story a > few months ago that teh FB was skewing liberal somehow in their news feed > stories? > Angry Meghan ‘miss piggie’ McCain enraged that Lauer didn’t ask Trump more > about Iraq > 18 hours ago Shelby Carella <http://prntly.com/author/josh/> no > Responses 1585 Views > > Meghan McCain doesn’t just look like Miss Piggie, and is only on TV > because he dad lost to Obama in 2008, but she also has a pig-like > conception of politics. > > > > -- > -- > TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "TV or Not TV" group. > To post to this group, send email to tvornottv@googlegroups.com > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > tvornottv-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "TVorNotTV" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to tvornottv+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to tvornottv@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to tvornottv-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tvornottv+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
