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by matt4077
3069 days ago
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I'm sure Facebook wouldn't care about a few million spent on a panel of the world's greatest connoisseurs of real news. This feature is in fact guaranteed to cost far more than a few experts ever would. But Facebook knows that any expert panel will without a sliver of doubt quickly converge to a ranking that has the Economist and the New York Times in top positions, and Breitbart somewhere behind a random word generator. Any working statistical method will lead to the same result, obviously. But it gives Facebook the option to invoke HN's favourite argument: "it can't be political because it's the algorithm. See: here are numbers."[0]. [0]: Compare, for example, the libertarian love for bitcoin, and how it's free from the politics that undermine Central Banks, |
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I read articles in the New York Times, the Economist and also Breitbart (UK edition) fairly regularly. Whilst they cover very different stories as you'd expect given their political biases, I have not noticed any major difference in accuracy when dealing with objective facts. This is partly because "mainstream" media is quite unreliable, rather than any awesome quality of reliability inherent to Breitbart, but the idea that it's unreliable seems to be to be coming from people who simply dislike conservative worldviews ... and desperately want to stop people from reading them. Same reason they try and smear anyone who goes looking as nazis, bigots etc. They fear that if someone reads things from the "other side" they might find it's not so unreasonable after all ...