Posted on 05/24/2016 12:03:30 PM PDT by Impala64ssa
Facebook announced Monday it was sending employees out for retraining and would discontinue some of its practices as it sought to defend itself against charges of political bias against conservatives.
The online giant denied that it’s shown “systematic political bias,” but admitted employees played a bigger role than previously acknowledged in determining what news is highlighted in the trending topics section.
Facebook also acknowledged that rogue employees may have unintentionally discriminated against conservative stories or even acted with malice in “isolated improper actions.”
In one instance Facebook rejected a story this year about the opening of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference — the largest gathering of right-wing activists in the country. Facebook says that was likely because there were already enough stories about the Republican presidential primary. But the company said since it allowed CPAC posts in 2015, and covered other parts of the 2016 conference, there wasn’t any discrimination.
“Our investigation has revealed no evidence of systematic political bias in the selection or prominence of stories included in the Trending Topics feature. In fact, our analysis indicated that the rates of approval of conservative and liberal topics are virtually identical in Trending Topics,” Colin Stretch, the company’s general counsel, said in an extensive reply to Sen. John Thune, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, who is probing the allegations of bias.
Former Facebook employees told Gizmodo earlier this month that they detected bias in the way news was “curated” by the site, with stories on top GOP figures, conservative commentators and right-wing causes getting short shrift.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Must have been from Cleveland.
Facebook is so full of crap about this.
A year ago, I reserved a URL with GoDaddy for an online business concept that I expect to launch at the end of this year.
Since I owned (and still own) the URL, I decided to see about setting up a Facebook page for my business. I know that there are many pages that have the same name. For example, if you do a FB search on “Jane Smith,” many FB pages will show up with that name.
So I wasn’t entirely suprised that there were already FB pages that used the same name as my business, although none of them offered the same product as I was offering
OK. Fair enough. But when I perused the various pages using the same name, I came across one that was downright pornographic, containing several videos of a guy engaging in very explicit sex acts.
I was horrified at the thought that someone searching for my business FB page might come across a pornographic page, so I reported it.
FB’s jaw-dropping response to my complaint was: “You reported [Page Name] for posting inappropriate content. We reviewed the profile you reported for posting inappropriate content and found it doesn’t violate our Community Standards.”
Keep in mind that Facebook’s so-called “Community Standards” reads in part as follows: “. . . Explicit images of sexual intercourse are prohibited. Descriptions of sexual acts that go into vivid detail may also be removed. Explicit images of sexual intercourse are prohibited. Descriptions of sexual acts that go into vivid detail may also be removed.”
Mind you, the videos on this page could not be more explicit — shot from a camera looking down on the bed as this man was having fully nude above-the-covers sexual intercourse with a young woman.
Not content to leave it there, I went on LinkedIn and found a FB employee whom I contacted with a LinkedIn message explaining what I had seen and my desire to have it removed.
This lady kindly wrote me the following message in reply:
“My first action was to report the content myself, and I received the same response you did and was shocked. I know the policy on pornography has not changed, so this post must be slipping through the cracks via human error. I did speak with a coworker of mine, and unfortunately, we do not possess the authority to go into individuals profiles to remove content (I believe this is a privacy violation, something we would get fired for if we tried to take action against this individual without the profile coming up in our review queue).. If its your new page that you are worried about, the brand identity should be able to distinguish your page versus this person’s profile. It also comes up as a “page” versus a “profile” in searches. The best advice I can offer you at this point is to keep reporting it and hopefully it gets caught soon. I am sorry that there is nothing further that we can do.”
Bottom line: Now, a year later, I just looked up the offending page to see if it is still there. It is. Only the video has changed. Now it has his ladyfriend stark naked on her back while he performs oral sex on her — again, above the covers, from a camera directly overhead.
Needless to say, I abandoned the idea of setting up a Facebook page for my business.
Facebook’s Community Standards are a complete joke.
Let’s see if I read that right...
They admit that there was bias against conservatives... but there was no bias.
Lol or scary I dont k own which but that was my first thought as well :)
Ah, yes. It’s the usual “mistakes were made” by “rogue employees” sophistry. Yada, yada, yada...
“Funny how all of the troublemakers in the world are either merely rogues or lone wolves...”
Only while ‘Rats are president.
The big difference here is that people PAY FOR certain services from FB. And then the FB employees purposely failed to comply with terms of the agreement.
FB is in deep doo doo if they lose a lawsuit- a class action could cost them $billions.
That is why they are playing so nice on this.
So Mark Zuckerberg is a “rogue employee”?
The retraining will be in methods to cover their tracks.
Make them change their name to Facebook.
Make them change their name to Fakebook.
I think Zuck missed his calling. With lines like these he could have been a comedian.
Or an Obama White House spokesmen.
I might have missed the prosecutions. Where was the Facebook board of directors handcuffed and put on trial?
Oh, they weren't? OK.
If the hand of government is not present, threatening to impose heavy enough fines to put them out of business, then there is no valid comparison with the bakery incident.
Sure. Especially when Zuckerberg was caught on hot mike in fall 2015 agreeing with Merkel, yes, we’ll censor anti-immigrant posts.
In other news, Facebook admits there may be snow in winter.
Yeah, maybe one person... not a pattern...not a problem... /s
Ed
That's a stretch.
Just another reason liberals are so thick. They are spoon-fed the “news” they want to hear. Then, when a Trump comes along, they’re blindsided. I love reading all their speculation about “how this could have happened.”
Don't get me wrong, both sides do it. Chick-fil-a is an example. There are many more.
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