Friday Night Owls: With code changes, Facebook helped rightwing publishers and throttled the left
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Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week At Mother Jones, Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery write—Facebook Manipulated the News You See to Appease Republicans, Insiders Say: Near the close of the first year of the TrumpFriday Night Owls: With code changes, Facebook helped rightwing publishers and throttled the left
Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week At Mother Jones, Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery write—Facebook Manipulated the News You See to Appease Republicans, Insiders Say: Near the close of the first year of the Trump presidency, executives at Facebook were briefed on some major changes to its News Feed—the code that determines which of the zillions of posts on the platform any one of us is shown when we look at Facebook. The story the company has publicly told is that it was working to “bring people closer together” by showing us more posts from friends and family, and to prioritize “trusted” and “informative” sources of news. The changes would also reduce how much news most people see, and therefore decrease revenue for many publishers. What wasn’t publicly known until now is that Facebook actually ran experiments to see how the changes would affect publishers—and when it found that some of them would have a dramatic impact on the reach of right-wing “junk sites,” as a former employee with knowledge of the conversations puts it, the engineers were sent back to lessen those impacts. As the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, they came back in January 2018 with a second iteration that dialed up the harm to progressive-leaning news organizations instead. Read more