Senate committee looks into Facebook’s news filtering methods

It’s not just your right-leaning friends worried that Facebook is pruning conservative perspectives out of its Trending News section. The US Senate’s Commerce Committee (led by Republican John Thune) has sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg asking him to answer questions about Facebook’s news curation methods. The group wants the social network to not only explain its news curation methods and policies, but show how it’s investigating alleged exclusions of conservative stories. Does it keep records of the judgment calls that curators make, for example?

The company has until May 24th to provide info, and Zuck is supposed to make staff available if the committee has any questions.

Facebook hasn’t formally responded to the letter as we write this (we’ve asked it for comment), but it has already denied playing fast and loose with its rules on political objectivity. As it stands, it’s not clear that this is anything more than an attempt to court outrage while it’s still hot. After all, it’s not as if the Senate can dictate Facebook’s news policy without running into thorny free speech issues. We’d add that Senate letters only occasionally translate to real action — this investigation could easily fizzle out unless there’s concrete proof of something shady going on.

Via: Gizmodo

Source: Senate.gov (PDF)

Facebook denies filtering conservative news stories

Even if your Facebook News Feed is full of family members dropping racist memes or links to factually inaccurate articles, you might not see such showing up in the “trending news” portion of the social network’s landing page. And there’s a reason for that: Workers “routinely suppressed” news stories that’d interest conservative users from the section, according to a report from Gizmodo. Those stories apparently include anything about the Conservative Political Action Conference, two-time Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney and posts from conservative news outlet The Drudge Report.

More than that, it appears Facebook wouldn’t curate a story with conservative origin (Breitbart, for example) unless it was picked up by The New York Times or BBC first. While Facebook’s company line is that it “takes allegations of bias very seriously” in light of the Gizmodo report, claiming “rigorous guidelines” to ensure consistency and neutrality and that those guidelines don’t “permit the suppression of political perspectives,” the sources for these allegations were contract workers — not full-on employees themselves. These contractractors worked for Facebook from the middle of 2014 until December 2015.

What appears in the Trending News module isn’t exclusively determined by an algorithm of what its users are actively sharing, it’s curated much like how an editorial newsroom operates. One of Gizmodo’s sources — who leans politically conservative — says that what would populate the list was largely determined by who was working at the time. If that person happened to not subscribe to conservative points of view, a story would be blacklisted. More than that, if a particular story is trending on Twitter but not Facebook? It’s “injected” into the Trending News section. Specific instances of that include the Black Lives Matter conversation or the ongoing conflict in Syria.

This isn’t the first time Facebook has come under fire for this type of thing. In 2014 the company admitted that it controversially, and experimentally, altered the News Feed to measure your emotional responses.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Gizmodo

Facebook can’t stop lawsuit over its facial recognition software

Facebook will have to battle it out in court over a lawsuit that claims the social network’s facial recognition software violates an Illinois privacy act. This week, a San Fransisco federal judge denied Facebook’s motion to dismiss the case. The suit alleges that Facebook’s facial recognition and photo-tagging system violates Illinois’ 2008 Biometric Information Privacy Act, which states that companies must receive explicit consent to collect identifiers including fingerprints and, in this case, faceprints.

Facebook outlines its photo-tagging process in its terms of service and users can opt out of it. The lawsuit will decide whether this measure qualifies as explicit consent under the privacy act.

“The Court accepts as true plaintiffs’ allegations that Facebook’s face recognition technology involves a scan of face geometry that was done without plaintiffs’ consent,” U.S. District Judge James Donato wrote in his ruling.

Facebook faced similar privacy concerns in Europe and Canada, and it stopped using the facial-recognition tech in those regions.

Source: CNBC

Oculus exec Mary Lou Jepsen resigns to create new MRI tech

Dr. Mary Lou Jepsen is well known for her work in pioneering display technology as a co-founder of OLPC, former head of the display division at Google X and lately Oculus VR, which she joined about a year ago. Tonight during the Anita Borg Institute’s Women of Vision awards banquet, the founder and former CEO of Pixel Qi capped off a keynote speech by announcing she will resign her post as Executive Director of Engineering and Head of Display Technologies at Oculus. Instead, she will focus on “curing diseases with new display technology,” by bringing MRI machines to every doctor’ office in the world. It’s an ambitious goal, but a peek at Dr. Jepsen’s history shows why she’s the person to tackle it.

“If we let one gender, race or age group create tech, those solutions won’t benefit everyone.” @mljmljmlj #WoV16

— Anita Borg Institute (@anitaborg_org) May 6, 2016

“I have decided to leave Facebook and Oculus to cure diseases with new imagery technology.” @mljmljmlj #WoV16

— Anita Borg Institute (@anitaborg_org) May 6, 2016

“After incubating this idea for a decade, I can barely wait to begin.” @mljmljmlj #WoV16

— Anita Borg Institute (@anitaborg_org) May 6, 2016

Source: Anita Borg Institute (Twitter)

Facebook tries out temporary reactions for Mother’s Day

While it’s not the first time Facebook has reminded you to call your mother, the ubiquitous social network is using Mother’s Day to test out some temporary Facebook reactions, The Verge notes. Twitter user Sreedev Sharma spotted the dainty purple flower icon in Facebook’s source code and a statement from Facebook confirms users in certain markets will be able to leave virtual flowers as reactions for a limited time.

Although the company didn’t specify which markets the flowers would show up in, it did confirm to The Verge that the United States wasn’t among them. In those places where it is available, it will disappear from the options come Monday morning, but will still appear on posts where it was left during the few days it was live. This also marks the first time since Facebook rolled out reactions in February that the company has added a temporary, event-based option.