[woodchuck64]

There's got be some non-political algorithms. Maybe tracking news articles to their sources (text/phrase similarity searching), showing sources, and flagging quality by accuracy of details? A few years of improvement on automatic text summarizing might be able to catch political "telephone" articles that erase and morph crucial details.

[mzw_mzw]

That just pushes the problem back, unfortunately. Do you trust the people who designed the algorithm? Even if they were wonderful, apolitical idealists, do you trust the people who maintain the systems after those guys leave the company to stick with it, no matter what? After all, this election is the Most Important One In Our Lifetimes, so surely it's okay to put our thumbs on the scale just a little bit in the name of truth and justice... it's for the sake of the children/gays/whoever, you know... what kind of heartless monster would just stand by when they could make a difference?

Ultimately the only way to really address this problem is to have a diverse variety of competing news sources so at least they aren't all captured in the same way at the same time. There's no way to line this up with Facebook being the One News Source, any more than if it was the government doing it.