Just as soon as news emerges that Facebook shuts the door on several of its former news editors so that an algorithm can do the job of picking the latest ‘trending’ news, rather than the sometimes biased brain of a breathing individual, we hear that the algorithm has its own way of screwing things up.

Out go the editors and almost immediately in came news about fake reports, one that involved Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly getting fired. Perhaps the pay-off, if the story had been real, was that it accrued over 200,000 Likes on Facebook before it was taken down under a salvo of discrediting stories from the media.

As has been pointed out, even though humans might show bias, the effect a fake news story could have (such as gunmen appearing in airports), could produce some amount of short-lived hysteria. While most mainstream news might best be treated with skepticism, perhaps outright fiction should meet a human editor before it goes to work on the public.

That’s a matter of opinion, and perhaps also a matter concerning what kind of service you believe you provide.

What is Facebook?

“We are a tech company, not a media company,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this week, but when one uses a social media platform, which that curates the news for you to find the latest going on in the world, the line is a little blurry.

To defend his statement Zuckerberg said that his company didn’t actually ‘create’ content, but on this point we might take sides with a recent story in Fortune that asks if you have to produce your own content to be a media company. The example Fortune gives is the Huffington Post and its early days of aggregating trending news.

You get what you need

Facebook gives you the news you supposedly want to hear, using an algorithm that delivers bespoke content. Only recently did many people discover that Facebook thinks it knows who you are going to vote for in the next U.S. presidential election – it thinks I’m an anarchic Marxist, if there is such a thing.

The danger, that has been stated a plethora of times, is readers living in a kind of “hall of flattering mirrors“, reading news and views that align with theirs, and in doing so never really attempting an inward dialectic with an opposing view. Like it or not, Facebook shapes the way you think, if not using a mold you yourself have created.

Photo credit: Marta Nørgaard via Flickr