Downgrading low-quality content in News Feed would anger conservatives, employees say
After having surveyed users on this types of news they found the most informative, Facebook’s News Tcrew offers ignore survey results by continuing to boost publishers who have posted clickbait, fake news and generally things no one wanted to read, according to an internal presentation. Users had considered this type poor quality material. Why did Facebook’s own employees make this recommendation? Because they believed any attempt to improve the quality of people’s information would lead to allegations of censorship by Republicans, according to the document. An employee wrote, “The News team has come up with an updated High Quality News ranking adjustment that has increased and improved the the effectiveness of the informative component of the score, which asks users how informative they find the content. The launch was stalled primarily due to political concerns about the effect it was having on some news publishers considered low-quality by the model, stemming from external criticism from some quarters of a perceived anti-conservative bias.
