Facebook may change algorithm to discriminate against small, independent media

During the contentious election season, Facebook implemented changes to its algorithm to give more weight to mainstream media outlets than to smaller, lesser-known publications. That strategy may become permanent, if Facebook employees have their way.

Facebook employees were particularly worried about stories in support of US President Donald Trump and stories that came from right-wing media outlets which claimed that the election was rigged.

Facebook may permanently implement these changes in order to calm people down, and purportedly reduce divisiveness and hate on their platform by promoting mainstream media over more highly engaged pages with overtly partisan content.

According to The New York Times, it was Facebook employees that "proposed an emergency change to the site’s news feed algorithm, which helps determine what more than two billion people see every day."

Those changes were to give emphasis to "news ecosystem quality" scores [NEQ]. These are "a secret internal ranking" that are assigned to "news publishers based on signals about the quality of their journalism."

While these scores typically "play a minor role in determining what appears on users' feeds... several days after the election, Mr. Zuckerberg agreed to increase the weight that Facebook’s algorithm gave to NEQ scores."

This was "to make sure authoritative news appeared more prominently."

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, has agreed to increase the weight Facebook's internal algorithm gives to news sites, in an effort to quash what they consider "misinformation."

These are part of what Facebook terms "break glass" measures, and at this time there has "never been a plan to make these permanent. The idea was to study and learn from them. However, key Facebook employees are starting to ask if it would be better if the "nicer news feed" could continue indefinitely.

The two points of view—freedom to post and read v. curated content without value-laden oversight—are clashing internally within Facebook, and perfectly represent a clash of two potentially prevailing philosophies, one which believe Facebook should be a change agent, and another which believes that they should focus on success.

The second camp also has deep concerns about treading into areas which may be deemed as censorship. This is not only considered ethically incorrect by many, but worries also abound about a potential wave of government regulation on Constitutional grounds if Facebook goes too far into policing its users.

Facebook has already gone before a Senate Committee under subpoena and had to explain its actions, which many considered to be amounting to censorship.

"There are tensions in virtually every product decision we make and we've developed a companywide framework called 'Better Decisions' to ensure we make our decisions accurately, and that our goals are directly connected to delivering the best possible experiences for people," said one spokesperson for Facebook.

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