[elorant]

This is so stupid. For one, people tend to have herd mentality. An article seen the wrong way could trigger an immense backfire where a medium's credibility tanks in a matter of days. And then it would take years to reverse the damage.

Furthermore, it opens the way for anyone with a botnet of infected machines to rig the credibility of any news outlet to his liking.

[fortythirteen]

It's only stupid if you believe Facebook wants to solve their echo chamber problem.

Facebook draws its revenue from personality profiling its users for targeted advertising. How much more profit do they make when they can actively push people towards binary thinking, and make them easy to categorize?

[matt4077]

It would seem that Facebook is rather well-positioned to identify such problems in the data.

They could, for example, only count votes by long-term users. They also have almost complete knowledge of their users' political leanings, making it possible to counteract any attempts at manipulation.

[pixl97]

Eh, if FB doesn't release those algorithms to an independent 3rd party, one I'd to assume that the manipulation is on FB's part.