Following accusations of bias and the raging ongoing controversy over fake news, social media giant Facebook and put up an advertisement seeking applications for “news credibility specialists” for checking the facts of content that appears on its site.
The latest lob listings were posted by Facebook last week. it has been almost two years that the company did away with its “trending” news team and instead started using complex algorithms for identification and fighting accusations of anti-conservative content and their editing.
According to the advertisements, Facebook was looking to hire “individuals with a passion for journalism, who believe in Facebook’s mission of making the world more connected”.
“As a member of the team, you’ll be tasked with developing a deep expertise in Facebook’s News Credibility Program,” applicants were told. “You’ll be conducting investigations against predefined policies.”
The company took down the advertisements initially for a short period of time following media reports about the ads but later reported them after minor changes. the job title was changed to “news publisher specialist” and the company has removed all reference to the news credibility programme of the company barring the URL which was kept the same. The jargon “a passion for journalism” was also removed.
Facebook’s head office would be the place of posting of the two jobs advertised and one of the posts requires fluency in Spanish. lists of credible news organisations used across the site would be among the other duties of the work.
The advertisements showcase the attempts by Facebook to manage news on its platform. The company’s “trending” module was stopped together by editors at the beginning of 2016. Further the company also merged the internal data of the unit related to what was being shared with that of stories published on a variety of mainstream media sources.
The process required editors to check with respected news organizations before allowing publication of any story on the trending section. This was Facebook’s effort of cutting down on hoaxes. But this process also attracted criticism as there were allegations of leftwing bias from U.S. conservatives. The complaints alleged that the list included sites like the New York Times and CNN but excludes ones like Breitbart or the Washington Examiner.
This prompted Facebook to fire al of its human editors and instead made use of an algorithm. It took just days for hoax news to dominate the trending module which was the beginning for the problems for Facebook related to fake news that played such a critical role during the 2016 November U.S. Presidential elections.
A Facebook spokesperson told the media: “We’re working on how we more effectively identify and differentiate news and news sources across our platform. For instance, we recently announced the Archive of Ads with Political Content, where we’ll build separate treatments for both news and non-news content.”
(Source:www.theguardian.com)
The latest lob listings were posted by Facebook last week. it has been almost two years that the company did away with its “trending” news team and instead started using complex algorithms for identification and fighting accusations of anti-conservative content and their editing.
According to the advertisements, Facebook was looking to hire “individuals with a passion for journalism, who believe in Facebook’s mission of making the world more connected”.
“As a member of the team, you’ll be tasked with developing a deep expertise in Facebook’s News Credibility Program,” applicants were told. “You’ll be conducting investigations against predefined policies.”
The company took down the advertisements initially for a short period of time following media reports about the ads but later reported them after minor changes. the job title was changed to “news publisher specialist” and the company has removed all reference to the news credibility programme of the company barring the URL which was kept the same. The jargon “a passion for journalism” was also removed.
Facebook’s head office would be the place of posting of the two jobs advertised and one of the posts requires fluency in Spanish. lists of credible news organisations used across the site would be among the other duties of the work.
The advertisements showcase the attempts by Facebook to manage news on its platform. The company’s “trending” module was stopped together by editors at the beginning of 2016. Further the company also merged the internal data of the unit related to what was being shared with that of stories published on a variety of mainstream media sources.
The process required editors to check with respected news organizations before allowing publication of any story on the trending section. This was Facebook’s effort of cutting down on hoaxes. But this process also attracted criticism as there were allegations of leftwing bias from U.S. conservatives. The complaints alleged that the list included sites like the New York Times and CNN but excludes ones like Breitbart or the Washington Examiner.
This prompted Facebook to fire al of its human editors and instead made use of an algorithm. It took just days for hoax news to dominate the trending module which was the beginning for the problems for Facebook related to fake news that played such a critical role during the 2016 November U.S. Presidential elections.
A Facebook spokesperson told the media: “We’re working on how we more effectively identify and differentiate news and news sources across our platform. For instance, we recently announced the Archive of Ads with Political Content, where we’ll build separate treatments for both news and non-news content.”
(Source:www.theguardian.com)
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