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Facebook is lowering the manipulation in your news consumption

Facebook is lowering the manipulation in your news consumption

While tailored content has several benefits of being a more personalised experience for an individual, in the case of news this can hinder and prevent you from gaining more varying perspectives and sources of information.

After controversy following claims that Facebook’s news curators were deliberately omitting stores from politically conservative outlets, Facebook has come out saying that they will lessen human input and rely more heavily of the algorithm in place in order to minimise bias. This is an important issue as over one billion users are exposed to Facebook’s trending topics sidebar. Earlier in the year it was revealed to business blog, Gizmodo, that particular news stories were excluded from the trending topic list as they were not popular enough whereas other content was purposefully injected.

The company has come out to say that “Facebook is a platform for all ideas, and we’re committed to maintaining Trending as a way for people to access a breadth of ideas and commentary about a variety of topics”.

Facebook founder and company owner Mark Zuckerberg. Credit: AFP
Facebook founder and company owner Mark Zuckerberg. Credit: AFP

To summarise, Facebook will remove the description accompanying trending topics in order to ensure that there isn’t risk associated with any bias input of the news curators when determining these descriptions and the angle of the story, however users will still see personalised news.

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