One could argue in could faith, that it's not so disturbing.
If FB encouraged a fringe community beacause they profited, they can't then entirely wash their hands when the fringe grows problems. It would look bad on their part and it's logical to hide stats.
I don't see that. The article doesn't mention regulation at all.
The conclusion of the article (literally as well as figuratively) is that Facebook needs to provide "...independent access for researchers to check the math..." (last paragraph in the article).
This is buttressed by the quotes from Frances Haugen in the article:
These findings chime with recent revelations from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who has repeatedly said the company has a tendency to cherry-pick statistics to release to the press and the public.
“They are very good at dancing with data,” Haugen told British lawmakers during a European tour.
I don't see regulation mentioned. The claims are that:
1. Far-right news sources are disproportionately popular on Facebook, and
2. Facebook has tried to disguise this fact.
Besides, the people I most often see calling for censorship of Facebook are doing so because they claim it is biased against right-wing viewpoints. The fact that popular news sources on Facebook skew right and that Facebook treats the far right with kid gloves are evidence against regulation.
>Citizen Browser is a national panel of paid Facebook users who automatically share their news feed data with The Markup. To analyze the websites whose content performs the best on Facebook, we counted the total number of times that links from any domain appeared in our panelists’ news feeds
Their methodology is as bad as Nielsen's old TV rating methodologies.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 20.7 ms ] threadIf FB encouraged a fringe community beacause they profited, they can't then entirely wash their hands when the fringe grows problems. It would look bad on their part and it's logical to hide stats.
The conclusion of the article (literally as well as figuratively) is that Facebook needs to provide "...independent access for researchers to check the math..." (last paragraph in the article).
This is buttressed by the quotes from Frances Haugen in the article:
These findings chime with recent revelations from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who has repeatedly said the company has a tendency to cherry-pick statistics to release to the press and the public.
“They are very good at dancing with data,” Haugen told British lawmakers during a European tour.
1. Far-right news sources are disproportionately popular on Facebook, and
2. Facebook has tried to disguise this fact.
Besides, the people I most often see calling for censorship of Facebook are doing so because they claim it is biased against right-wing viewpoints. The fact that popular news sources on Facebook skew right and that Facebook treats the far right with kid gloves are evidence against regulation.
Their methodology is as bad as Nielsen's old TV rating methodologies.