Facebook ‘quality news’ prioritization may result in ‘bias & won’t change quality’.RT: The Facebook news head said news isn't created equal. Who should decide what's quality among all the quantity of stories? Yair Cohen: The original idea was that the Facebook users will decide what quality is and what is not quality. Now, it seems that Facebook wants to make this decision. I think that Facebook is clearly concerned about governments taking over, moderating and removing content from its own platform. So, Facebook has decided to take the initiative and moderate its own content. …Currently, Facebook has got approximately 7,000 individuals who are responsible for creating policies for Facebook, policing those policies and then making a decision what content should be viewed by users, what content shouldn’t be viewed by users. But these 7,000 are not operating within any form of transparency. Nobody really knows what they are doing and I think this is quite dangerous. RT: When we look at fake news or quality news, what criteria can be used to create a ranking system? Read more © Jaap Arriens / Global Look PressGoogle’s de-ranking of RT in search results is a form of censorship and blatant propaganda YC: It is a subjective issue, the most important thing is that people will know what criteria is being used… I just came back from a conference in California, it was the first conference of its kind where the leaders of the largest social media companies got together to speak for the first time publicly about how they moderate and remove content. And it was very clear that the whole process is being done in secret. There is no published criteria. And the reason they say they don’t publish the criteria – they don’t want people to manipulate the content. So, the whole process is very highly secretive. Provided we know what the criterion is, then we can judge for ourselves whether it is right for Facebook or for any other organization to remove content or not. But as long as we don’t know about it, it seems to me pretty much totalitarian, this whole regime.
