WHY does a company that “allowed voices to be heard in Iran and Egypt…silence the voices of anyone here?”. Glenn Beck, a conservative commentator, asked that question recently in a post (published on Facebook, of course). On May 18th he and a handful of other conservatives met Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of the world’s most popular social network, to discuss reports that Facebook has stopped conservative news being prominently displayed on the platform. Mr Zuckerberg denies bias. John Thune, a Republican senator, has asked Facebook to submit more information about how it ranks topics and posts by May 24th.
Such disquiet about liberal bias reflects long-running mistrust between conservatives and Democratic-leaning Silicon Valley. It is overblown. The alleged censorship concerns a feature on Facebook’s desktop version called “trending topics”, which relies on curators to help select the news items to highlight in one section of Facebook. It does not apply to the personalised, central “newsfeed”, where users spend most of their time and where content is chosen by algorithms. The social network’s priority is to get people to spend as long as possible on Facebook, which means showing the most relevant content to each user. The more time people spend, the more ads Facebook can sell. It has no interest in alienating conservative users.
Yet the hullabaloo points to an indisputable fact: Facebook is a juggernaut, with growing political influence. The social network has 1.6 billion monthly users, around 200m of them in America. On average, Americans spend 30% of their mobile-internet time on Facebook’s platforms, which include Instagram and WhatsApp. Around 90% of American adults who use Facebook pass the equivalent of two workdays a month on the social network. Facebook is no longer just a destination for virtual socialising but a media company that can shape public opinion.
Facebook can transform people’s moods and political behaviour. One study, published in 2014, showed that users’ moods could be influenced by whether the posts they saw on Facebook were joyful or depressing. Another study, published in Nature in 2012, determined that around 340,000 people probably turned up to vote in the congressional elections of 2010 because of a message they saw on Facebook, and were especially likely to do so if a friend shared the call-to-action.
This week your correspondent spent more time than usual on Facebook, researching and procrastinating, and was targeted with an ad to register for next month’s California primaries. Appeals to vote or donate money to a natural disaster are not uncommon. Mr Zuckerberg, who is 32, is an idealist and talks frequently about connecting people, improving education and changing immigration policy. In public remarks last month he criticised “fearful voices for building walls and distancing people they view as others.”
Such disquiet about liberal bias reflects long-running mistrust between conservatives and Democratic-leaning Silicon Valley. It is overblown. The alleged censorship concerns a feature on Facebook’s desktop version called “trending topics”, which relies on curators to help select the news items to highlight in one section of Facebook. It does not apply to the personalised, central “newsfeed”, where users spend most of their time and where content is chosen by algorithms. The social network’s priority is to get people to spend as long as possible on Facebook, which means showing the most relevant content to each user. The more time people spend, the more ads Facebook can sell. It has no interest in alienating conservative users.
Yet the hullabaloo points to an indisputable fact: Facebook is a juggernaut, with growing political influence. The social network has 1.6 billion monthly users, around 200m of them in America. On average, Americans spend 30% of their mobile-internet time on Facebook’s platforms, which include Instagram and WhatsApp. Around 90% of American adults who use Facebook pass the equivalent of two workdays a month on the social network. Facebook is no longer just a destination for virtual socialising but a media company that can shape public opinion.
Facebook can transform people’s moods and political behaviour. One study, published in 2014, showed that users’ moods could be influenced by whether the posts they saw on Facebook were joyful or depressing. Another study, published in Nature in 2012, determined that around 340,000 people probably turned up to vote in the congressional elections of 2010 because of a message they saw on Facebook, and were especially likely to do so if a friend shared the call-to-action.
This week your correspondent spent more time than usual on Facebook, researching and procrastinating, and was targeted with an ad to register for next month’s California primaries. Appeals to vote or donate money to a natural disaster are not uncommon. Mr Zuckerberg, who is 32, is an idealist and talks frequently about connecting people, improving education and changing immigration policy. In public remarks last month he criticised “fearful voices for building walls and distancing people they view as others.”
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