Facebook Inc FB 1.34% has taken a lot of heat in the past month after former contractors claimed that the platform’s “trending topics” were chosen by human editors with liberal bias. Facebook has defended the political neutrality of its “trending topics” by arguing that its hand-selected stories are first “surfaced by an algorithm.”
However, the New York Times’ Zeynep Tufekci pointed out that the algorithms themselves are the true source of Facebook’s bias.
Algorithms are highly-complicated computer programs that are designed to take massive amounts of data input and produce an optimal output. For sites like Facebook, that means finding “trending topics” that will engage users.
Alphabet Inc GOOG 0.16% GOOGL 0.16% says that its Google search engine algorithms are “computer programs that look for clues to give you back exactly what you want.”
But Tufekci argues that giving the users what they want is not what the algorithms are actually designed to do. Facebook and Google instead want users to stay engaged with their services, which translates to more advertising revenue for the companies. These companies might argue that engaging content is what users want, but Tufekci says…
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