![]() Since 2020, he has also served as chair of the board of Armalux Ltd., a company that engages in the field of laser systems. Adam has served as a director of Arma Ferrea Ltd., a company that develops and manufactures reactive armor systems, and as a director of Arma Kinetica Ltd., a company in the field of kinetic energy solutions. Adam served as director general of the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Adam has served as a strategic consultant to various public and private companies in the technology sector since June 2020. All of the same kinds of questions apply to how the main news feed works, and so far there hasn’t been much openness about that at all, nor any real admission that the company has any ethical or moral responsibility related to how it shapes the world-view of its billion-plus users.Mr. But in many ways, the trending section is a sideshow. One upside of the Trending Topics controversy is that Facebook (FB) has become a little more open and transparent about how the feature works, and what principles guide those choices. We believe the world is better when people from different backgrounds and with different ideas all have the power to share their thoughts and experiences.” He said he would be inviting “leading conservatives” and people from all across the political spectrum to talk with him and share their points of view about the issues raised by the Gizmodo story. Zuckerberg also said that Facebook “stands for giving everyone a voice. He said that Facebook was conducting a full investigation of the Gizmodo report and added that “if we find anything against our principles, you have my commitment that we will take additional steps to address it.” In an update posted to his Facebook page late on Thursday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Trending Topics was designed to highlight “the most newsworthy and popular” conversations on Facebook, and that the site’s guidelines did not permit the suppression of political perspectives. Nor did he talk about whether Facebook bears any kind of editorial or journalistic responsibility because of its size and market power. ![]() So everything is personalized, via the algorithm, in order to give users the impression that they are “informed,” as he described it.Ĭathcart didn’t talk about any of the potential down-sides of this approach, such as the “filter bubble” effect that can keep users from seeing potentially important topics because they don’t fit the platform’s pre-conceived notions of what that user is already interested in. In effect, Cathcart said that with more than a billion users, Facebook can’t possibly make across-the-board decisions about what is newsworthy or what is crucial information for users to know and what isn’t. He insisted that all the social network wants to do is “give users what they want.” The definition of that, he said, is left up to the algorithm. In an interview with The Verge tech news site about Instant Articles (a feature that takes content from news partners and makes it mobile-friendly by customizing it for the Facebook platform), news-feed product manager Will Cathcart talked about Facebook’s approach to curating news. ![]() In a blog post, a Facebook vice president said the Gizmodo story was inaccurate, and that the site doesn’t “allow or advise our reviewers to discriminate against sources of any political origin, period.” Justin Osofsky said all the system does is “help surface the most important popular stories, regardless of where they fall on the ideological spectrum.” Facebook got some nasty comments, not just from the head of the Republican National Committee, but also from the head of the Senate Commerce Committee, who asked CEO Mark Zuckerberg to make his staff available for questions about how editorial decisions were being made at the social network. This led to criticism about the appearance of bias against right-wing sources (since many of the sites that were not included were conservative-leaning). Then a second piece appeared that featured comments from an anonymous editor about how staff routinely kept certain sites and topics out of the Trending feed. ![]() The original story focused on how these editorial contractors believed they were simply training Facebook’s news-filtering algorithms, and didn’t feel that the social network cared about journalism much, except as raw material for its engagement engines. The controversy started earlier this week with a piece by tech news site Gizmodo that looked at how several journalists who worked on the Trending Topics feature were treated by the social network, and what they were expected to do.
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