This week I was asked by The Baptist Press to comment on the Facebook Trending News controversy (you can read the article here). Looking back, the more I look at the issues people are raising, the more I find the situation to be absurd. I think Ben Thompson stated it best:
This, then, is the deep irony of this controversy: Facebook is receiving a huge amount of criticism for allegedly biasing the news via the empowerment of a team of human curators to make editorial decisions, as opposed to relying on what was previously thought to be an algorithm; it is an algorithm, though — the algorithm that powers the News Feed, with the goal of driving engagement — that is arguably doing more damage to our politics than the most biased human editor ever could. The fact of the matter is that, on the part of Facebook people actually see — the News Feed, not Trending News — conservatives see conservative stories, and liberals see liberal ones; the middle of the road is as hard to find as a viable business model for journalism (these things are not disconnected).
via The Real Problem With Facebook and the News – Stratechery by Ben Thompson