[throwawaykeno]

> Editorial control and algorithmic control are two different things.

It's also a meaningless distinction.

The point of contention is the bias, not whether the bias is imposed by an algorithm or by a human. People would still be complaining if Facebook had tweaked its algorithm to achieve identical outputs instead of employing humans to do it manually.

The truth seems to be somewhere in-between -- it was algorithmically generated and then the output was human-modified.

In general, I think the response to this post demonstrates the prevalence of magical thinking about computers, even by people who ought to know better. Bias is bias regardless of whether it's explicitly programmed behavior, emergent behavior from a carefully trained neural net, or enforced in human processes post-hoc. Distinguishing between these on the basis of where the behavior came from -- rather than whether or not there's a bias -- misses the point.

> I don't see any assertion that there's a legal problem in the parent.

The point of my post wasn't to contradict the parent post. There certainly are people who do claim it's a legal problem.

[TrevorJ]

It isn't meaningless in this case at all. "Trending" suggests that it reflects, so some level, popular opinion about what people are discussing. If the items aren't trending, but are hand curated, then you've essentially lied.