[HN Gopher] Facebook changes algorithm to boost original reporting
___________________________________________________________________
Facebook changes algorithm to boost original reporting
Author : jbegley
Score : 55 points
Date : 2020-06-30 13:23 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.axios.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.axios.com)
| tumetab1 wrote:
| It seems these days opaque machine learning models means
| transparency.
|
| I would prefer they would say that they're down grading their
| preference for user engagement, and time on platform, for what
| the trained model says it's original reporting.
| r721 wrote:
| >In conjunction with those changes, Facebook will also begin to
| down-rank news in its algorithm that doesn't have bylines, or
| present information about the company's editorial staff on the
| publishers' website.
|
| Will they down-rank The Economist, I wonder? :)
| mc32 wrote:
| I imagine they can whitelist known trustworthy entities that
| follow some modicum of rules.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| This is the actual press release. Shame on axios for not linking
| to it.
|
| https://about.fb.com/news/2020/06/prioritizing-original-news...
| djohnston wrote:
| is this irony?
| caiobegotti wrote:
| This is a critical bit that won't address the problem worldwide:
|
| _For now, the tech giant is focusing on stories in English. It
| hopes to expand to other languages in the future._
| chillacy wrote:
| It's pretty typical for companies to start with English and
| expand from there. Siri had a similar arc, now it supports
| 20ish and continues to grow.
| rmrk wrote:
| "it will use artificial intelligence to analyze groups of
| articles on a particular story topic and identify the ones most
| often cited as the original source."
|
| and
|
| "Facebook will also begin to down-rank news in its algorithm that
| doesn't have bylines, or present information about the company's
| editorial staff on the publishers' website."
|
| Okay those are the new requirements for content mills and fake
| propaganda outlets. How long before they adapt?
|
| Actually vetting reporters, reportage and news outlets is really
| hard for a team of smart humans editors to do. Even the premiere
| organizations like the NYT and Washington Post with their armies
| of editors has failed at this from time to time. Algorithms are
| not ready for this task yet.
| chillacy wrote:
| > Google said last year that it adjusted its algorithms and the
| guidelines used by the people that rate its search results to
| elevate original reporting.
|
| Have we seen these adaptations yet? It's been half a year since
| Google announced their intentions too.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| The ranking algorithm does not do the vetting. The algorithm
| just chooses how to weight the vetting outcome to rank the
| content.
| ksk wrote:
| Fair point, but its likely very hard if not impossible to
| create AI algorithms for automatic/guided content
| curation/classification without deploying them in a real-world
| use-case.
| rmrk wrote:
| For me this is the crux of the issue with The Platforms
| giving rise to "fake news".
|
| We as a society have decided that rampant mis-information and
| propaganda is only worth solving if we can automate it. If we
| actually have to pay real people real money to fix it on an
| ongoing basis, that's just too expensive.
|
| Sure there are problems having Humans doing this work too,
| but they are still way ahead of AI in this problem space.
|
| How long do we wait for automated solutions while these
| problems impose real costs to society?
| luckylion wrote:
| I have doubts that you can do it without heavy automation.
| Sure, eventually some human can decide whether something is
| "factual-ish" or not. But producing content is much easier
| and can be automated, so the attackers can flood the
| system.
|
| If you want humans involved, you end up with a gate keeper,
| which essentially means "unless you're an accredited media
| organization, your content is considered fake", because you
| can't vet individual pieces.
| rmrk wrote:
| I agree with you. It'd take a huge company with tons of
| resources at its disposal to do something like this if
| it's possible at all. But if anyone could hire and train
| the army necessary to do it, it'd be google or facebook.
| (Apple already does it. Apple News is edited by real
| apple-employed humans but its far smaller in scope).
|
| I think real solutions are gonna require us to break out
| of our tech-focused approaches and find ways to get
| Google, Facebook, Twitter to really start to care about
| fixing this stuff. Unfortunately I think that means it'll
| have to start costing them.
| rhizome wrote:
| > _" it will use artificial intelligence to analyze groups of
| articles on a particular story topic and identify the ones most
| often cited as the original source."_
|
| Great idea, they should give it a snappy name, maybe something
| that rhymes with "stage tank." Of course this does nothing WRT
| organizations that tend not to cite earlier reportage when it
| originates outside of the company.
|
| > _How long before they adapt?_
|
| Why, that would require creating a staff of fake names, so in a
| lot of cases it'll probably be completed sometime around close
| of business today. Maybe the end of the week.
| basch wrote:
| Deduping blogspam and re-reporting of AP/Reuters, and using
| that redundancy to uprank the original source, is something
| Facebook should have been doing a decade ago.
|
| It should be more akin to https://techmeme.com (or hn for
| that matter) where they editorially try and choose the first
| or best source. If a better source becomes available they
| swap. Facebook could benefit from this dynamicness, where a
| story can bump and replace an existing post.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Well this is the next logical step for AdTech. Since all of the
| newspapers and other media outlets have been disrupted by the
| rest of the AdTech industry the next step would be to allow for
| people to create content on the platform and then you keep your
| moat.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-06-30 23:01 UTC)