Facebook May Be Controlling The News You See On The Famous Social Media Site

Facebook is apparently monitoring the trending topics that viewers get to see on logging into the site. According to a report, Facebook is trying to control how people consume news.

As per a report in the Guardian, there are 1.6 billion users of Facebook, which means that 1/7th of the world are on the social networking site. Additionally, FB users reportedly spend at least an hour on it daily; with 63 percent of American users getting theirs news from it. In fact, 31 percent of global users get their news from the site. The figures make Facebook rather influential.

According to Facebook, "The stories that show in your News Feed are influenced by your connections and activity on Facebook. This helps you to see more stories that interest you from friends you interact with the most." As far as Facebook's trending topics are concerned, which include the 10 highlighted news on the right side of news feed, featuring four general subjects like entertainment, sports, science and technology, and politics ‐ the topics selected are those that have recently gained popularity on the portal. Additionally, the topics are based on numerous other factors like user location, liked pages, timeliness and engagement.

No one actually has a real idea about how any news is chosen as trending. The prevalent belief is that FB algorithm analyzes what is up‐and‐coming based on what users are talking about and sharing. Subsequently, Facebook editors choose what stories to present to the audience, and from which news organizations. However, recent revelations suggest that editors can introduce certain stories which may neither be trending nor popular in real. Similarly, they can also blacklist a story from showing up altogether. So, even though algorithm is involved, it is the human curators at Facebook who decide what is going to be trending or show up as news.

Many believe this is a kind of bias work done by Facebook. Apart from this, the social networking site also prefers to shows more of live videos, as introduced with Facebook Live, than links to articles in the news feed. Similarly, the company has a penchant for putting up publishers' articles that can be accessed quickly without actually having to leave FB. The portal also prefers to put up news and links of certain organizations more than others, such as New York Times and BuzzFeed that work closely with Facebook. In fact, FB pays these two companies to generate content for them. According to reports, there are apparently 10 news organizations that are on FB's preferred list.

Facebook's preference coupled with its algorithms ensures that users mostly get information from a chosen few news orgs. Also, even if users have not liked a certain news organization's page on FB, they will still get to see news published by them on their feed, if someone in the user's list has shared those links or liked them. However, FB will also show news or links similar to the liked pages by a user to make them stay on FB longer. Recent claims by ex‐Facebook workers suggest that conservative news is not highlighted in the trending section, and it is alarming to see how much power Facebook can wield, so much so that the Senate wants to look at it.

For now, Facebook has reportedly maintained that they are working on removing political bias, and on tweaking their practices and algorithms. However, according to a report, FB users too can influence what they want to see on their news feed, or trending topics for that matter, by actually being clear about what they want. Facebook will mostly put 'coveted' information in front of the users, if they know what individuals are looking for. Therefore, one should like, share or comment on those things that they favor so that FB can get the hint.