[_yvjs]

The point he's making is that Facebook can't be trusted to self-regulate (in the context of privacy). With that assumption you probably wouldn't accept their opaque self-investigation so placidly.

I think the point is that a casual observer would not have guessed trending tropics were so influenced by human intervention, and might have taken them to be an actual reflection of the Facebook hivemind. Further the statement of "no evidence of systematic political bias" is a bit hard to swallow given reports of Facebook employees asking "what Facebook can do to stop Donald Trump" at their all-hands (one of the top 5 questions in a poll [0] not just a lone employee walking up to the microphone). Further, the people curating these feeds are probably underpaid and young, and hence are probably going to skew left of the average journalist. Bias doesn't have to be explicit to be systematic.

Anyway I find Donald Trump + much of the rest of the GOP field pretty reprehensible politics-wise, Facebook seems to be handling things well [1], and we shouldn't worry about a conflict of interest as much as w/ advertising+privacy [2], but some amount of vigilance seems wise given how much influence these platforms can have over political outcomes [3]. Twitter in particular seems to have made a few fairly illiberal moves lately from my POV.

[0] http://gizmodo.com/facebook-employees-asked-mark-zuckerberg-...

[1] https://medium.com/@glennbeck/what-disturbed-me-about-the-fa...

[2] One shouldn't discount the H1B angle completely though.

[3] http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-co...