Facebook’s ‘Injection Tools’
So it’s come to this. After half a century of right-wing invective targeting the alleged scourge of liberal media bias, conservative activists are up in arms over the (unverified) claim that social-media page designers are tweaking impartial news-feed algorithms—in a sinister leftward fashion, it need hardly be added.
The kerfuffle dates back to a Gizmodo dispatch published earlier this month, which aired the complaints of two unnamed erstwhile “curators” employed until recently in Facebook’s influential Trending Topics traffic engine. The former Facebookers, both conservatives, alleged that an algorithmic “injection tool” permitted higher-ups in the Trending Topics shop to artificially elevate certain stories and topics to the top of the list, even though user data indicated that these were not, as Facebook advertised, the stories spurring the highest levels of engagement in the user community. The beneficiaries of this selective procedure were left causes like the Black Lives Matter movement, the former Topic-Trenders alleged—while conservative events and newsmakers in a given news cycle—Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and the annual Conservative Political Action Committee gathering—were given short shrift, even though they allegedly drew robust levels of Facebook discussion.
After fielding a stupefyingly fatuous request for testimony before the Commerce Committee headed up by Ken-doll South Dakota Republican senator John Thune, the Zuckerberg data empire went swiftly into damage-control mode. After paying ritual obeisance to Thune—something no self-respecting journalistic organization would want to do—Facebook’s leaders genially hosted a delegation of conservative political and media luminaries. And earlier this week, company officials announced some core revisions in the protocols that shape the anointment of bona fide Trending Topics. The company would, for instance, retire its past reliance on a stable of one thousand news sites and RSS feeds to assess the newsworthiness of a given topic, and the retirement of the in-house convention of assigning an “importance level” to a potentially trending story or subject. All the while, Facebook has stoutly denied that the selection of Trending Topics was animated by any personal or political agenda. The results of its in-house inquiry into the matter were summed up in typical bloodless corporatespeak:
READ MOREThe Anti-Imperial Emperor
The U.S. presidential campaign has provided the “developing” world with a remarkable spectacle. Donald Trump’s antics have served as welcome evidence that political tragedy and disaster don’t only happen down here in less rich countries.
But political idiocy coming from the United States is not exactly new or shocking. What has come as a surprise, however, is the ease with which the mainstream political conversation now affirms that globalization has actually been bad for the United States.
All three remaining candidates now accept (to some extent) the premise that the trade deals and global financialization that have made up the last three decades of world history have been mistakes, and that those mistakes need fixing, for America’s sake. Liberal outlets in the United States are piously worried that a kind of de-globalization may even be good for the United States, but would be bad for the world’s poor.
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• Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, seems to have a finger in every pie. According to a report from Forbes, it turns out that the tech billionaire has been bankrolling Hulk Hogan’s, a.k.a. Terry Bollea’s, lawsuit against Gawker. While it’s unclear how or why Thiel is backing Hogan’s litigation efforts, he’s on the record as having a longstanding grudge against the company, which outed him as gay in 2007 and has written extensively about his bizarre right-wing politics. But, hey, so have we!
• Although Thiel, a Trump supporter who just happens to think that women being able to vote ruined democracy, continues to pose a significant threat to American politics, there is some good news! That is, Mary Lou Bruner—a nutjob conspiracy theorist running for the Texas Board of Education—has lost her shot at political office! Too bad; we really needed more school textbooks telling the “truth” about Obama’s days living as a gay prostitute in order to pay for his drug habit . . .
• Like Bernie Sanders? You’ll love Karl Polanyi.
READ MOREThis Election Is an Endless, Sweaty TSA Line
Politics is hard, so The Baffler has employed expert comic mind David Rees to give us a visual rendering of the day’s signature political controversies. The only problem is that David can’t draw, so his cartoons are word pictures—which is to say, words.
American political cartoons, like political jokes told by men in suits on late-night television, are most rewarding when multiple current events and cultural references are jammed inside a single container. An expert satirist can combine a political story with one from the entertainment world to produce a synthesis of delight that illuminates both sources.
Here’s a recent example from The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon: “I hate to break it to Donald Trump, but there is already a Broadway show called Hairspray.”
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• In Baffler, no. 31 (which is out next week!), Astra Taylor columnizes on the effects of the EU-Turkey deal, supposedly designed to stem the flow of migrants over the sea by sending them into Turkey. Contrary to that agreement, though, the Greeks aren’t willing to deport migrants to a nation that stifles human rights and the press, as writes the Economist. “Greek officials insist that the 1951 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees must be respected. They say that Turkey does not fully comply with the convention since it is not a safe haven for all refugees.”
• Also appearing in issue 31 is Melissa Gira Grant’s salvo on Boston’s forgotten red light district, the “Combat Zone.” In Pacific Standard today, Gira Grant weighs up changes in attitudes since the publication of the anthology Whores, in 1997: “Whores was premised on challenging the feminist polarization about either being ‘for’ or ‘against’ sex work. But fighting sex workers’ rights out on those terms puts a politics of sex in front of what could be a politics of sex as work.”
• Godforsaken Yahoo boss Marissa Mayer was very weirdly painted as Jesus for Variety’s May issue. (Quoth Yahoo: “Running that cover illustration is Variety’s own burden to bear.”) We would like the cover better if Baffler senior editor and former Yahoo news executive Chris Lehmann, featured in the tableau.
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• “Someone like Snowden should not have felt the need to harm himself just to do the right thing,” says John Crane in a Guardian excerpt of Mark Hertsgaard’s book Bravehearts, about the discrediting and danger whistleblowers face. Also quoted is former NSA worker and whistleblower Bill Binney, who Kade Crockford interviewed on the Baffler blog.
• Megyn Kelly has a book out a week after the election, in which, she teases, “for the first time I will speak openly about my year with Donald Trump.” The mutual publicity that Kelly and Trump have lavished on each other by way of their public tiff reached its natural conclusion last week when, as Christian Lorentzen writes, “Kelly treated him [in Tuesday’s interview] like an occasionally vengeful but ultimately benign demigod.”
• Today in huffs: Angry Billionaire Denied Entry to Musical.
READ MOREInterview with Whistleblower Bill Binney
Bill Binney resigned from his job as technical director of the NSA in October 2001. The data-monitoring tool he had developed, ThinThread, had been shelved and, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush-Cheney administration chose dragnet monitoring instead. He spoke to Kade Crockford in February of this year.
Kade Crockford: You, Bill Binney, are a mathematician. You built a tool, ThinThread, that would enable the NSA to filter the world’s Internet traffic, but only wiretap the communications that likely contained information about threats to U.S. security, is that right?
Bill Binney: Yes, based on probable reasons to look at people.
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• Google’s annual I/O conference is “making nerds go outside” this year, its new, open-air venue prompting comparisons to Coachella.
• Healthcare for all? A recent study found that HIV-positive cancer patients are less likely to receive diagnosis and treatment for cancer than their HIV-negative counterparts.
• Our friends over at Pacific Standard report on the petition to rename Rikers Island, one of the nation’s most famous prisons. The institution is back in the spotlight after recent prisoner abuse scandals, and, according to historians, “the Riker name [has come] to represent both a contemporary crisis and a series of long-forgotten historical crimes.”
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