What Happened When Facebook Hired Some Journalists

http://gizmodo.com/want-to-know-what-facebook-really-thinks-of-journalists-1773916117

by hollaur • 10 years ago

102 99 10 years ago

andrewfromx2• 10 years ago

"After doing a tour in Facebook’s news trenches, almost all of them came to believe that they were there not to work, but to serve as training modules for Facebook’s algorithm." ha! aren't we all.

mc326• 10 years ago

So.... They finally know what it feels like to be a blue collar worker whose job gets outsourced and sometimes are offered benefits contingent on training their offshore trainees.

Everyone was happy to have $30 jeans which could last one year over their $70 jeans made stateside which could last five years or more... But now that it affects them, oh my, this is bad now...

Retra2• 10 years ago

Everyone was happy to have $30 jeans which could last one year over their $70 jeans made stateside which could last five years or more...

I'm not sure this analogy works. Surely the people selling jeans would prefer to sell new $30 pairs every year rather than $70 pairs every five.

paganel• 10 years ago

Everyone was happy to have $30 jeans which could last one year over their $70 jeans made stateside which could last five years or more...

My only piece of designer clothes was a $160 pair of jeans that lasted for only 3 or so years. I concluded that from now on I should stick with buying $50 jeans which last me at least 2 years.

andrewfromx2• 10 years ago

“It was degrading as a human being,” said another. “We weren’t treated as individuals." hmmm. Trying hard to feel sympathy/emapthy for these victums but my algorithm is throwing an exception.

notliketherest4• 10 years ago

When the employees of Facebook collectively ask "What responsibility do we have to stop the election of Donald Trump" at an internal meeting, it gives me Orwellian chills. Today, it's not governments we need to fear the most, it's data hungry, fascist internet corporations.

mc326• 10 years ago

Sometimes people have a hard time decoupling politics from their jobs. They should try how ridiculous it would sound to say "What can we do to stop Bernie Sanders". That should give them pause. As far as I know all the major candidates are operating within the law and thus we ought not try to Stop Them" just because our politics differ.

Or what if instead of national figures FB or anyone else tried to railroad an SF Supe they didn't particularly like because they shot down their proposed development. Or Menlo Park.

maxerickson• 10 years ago

If they all agree, why shouldn't they collectively act to accomplish some thing or the other?

Which is a completely different thing than manipulating their users, which they shouldn't be doing for any reason.

notliketherest4• 10 years ago

Exactly. The problem is, as a private company, should Facebook choose to manipulate it's news feed algorithm to promote one candidate or the other, or for whatever reason, this would be its prerogative under the First Amendment.

I personally choose to not use Facebook specifically for these reasons. Even though I know many Facebook employees personally, I don't trust it's employees to divorce their own interests and their powerful position as Facebook's curators.

kristianc3• 10 years ago

I don't remember this being a point of discussion when Reddit did an AMA with Obama.

arcticfox• 10 years ago

Doesn't Reddit do AMAs with almost anyone? I'm missing something.

jessriedel• 10 years ago

Very much agree, but do you really think it's all that different at the NY Times? I'm sure at FB no one thought they were going to beat Trump by being deceptive or manipulative. No, they would just link to stories they thought were more accurate, had less spin, covered more sides etc. Likewise, I'm sure many NY Times reporters are driven by a feeling of duty to concentrate on issues where they feel they can bring truth/illumination to the campaign and get Trump defeated.

I guess it's plausible to me that a new company like FB lacks some sort of important company culture for reporting that the NY Times has by virtue of its long history, but this seems minor. The real issue is (1) the consolidation in the news industry and (2) its political homogeneity. FB and the NY Times are each examples of both.

notliketherest4• 10 years ago

There's a few important differences at play I think. First, the NYT has a few million paid subscribers, whereas Facebook is a free service with a billion and a half members. Just like their technical infrastructure, the sheer scale of their platform and reach is mind-boggling, global and borderless - unlike anything the world has ever seen. We may be fooling ourselves by judging Facebook through the lens of old media - there's been a paradigm shift and it needs to be appreciated and judged as such. Second, the NYT is a media company - which generally leans left. They create content. Facebook is more akin to the printing press company that newspaper companies employee (ROUGH analogy) or cable providers for TV. Remember how much shit Verizon (Comcast?) got itself in when it manipulated internet packets to deliver it's own advertising to its subscribers? Didn't they get sued and have to pay millions? I think Facebook manipulating its news feed algorithm should be as egregious as that behavior.

sinemetu11• 10 years ago

There was a recent study looking at this possible issue. They called it Search Engine Manipulation Effect [1]:

"The fifth experiment is especially notable in that it was conducted with eligible voters throughout India in the midst of India’s 2014 Lok Sabha elections just before the final votes were cast. The results of these experiments demonstrate that (i) biased search rankings can shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20% or more, (ii) the shift can be much higher in some demographic groups, and (iii) search ranking bias can be masked so that people show no awareness of the manipulation."

[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/E4512.abstract

downandout• 10 years ago

I am no fan of anyone that is currently running for President. Assuming that Clinton, Sanders, or Trump ultimately win, Congress and the Senate will have to be our last line of defense in keeping the "winner" from doing serious damage to the country.

That said, I absolutely think that Facebook and other major media outlets should be held to a form of the Equal Time rule:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule

The fact that we don't have an equivalent rule for major websites is a serious problem.

hermannj3142• 10 years ago

I would normally disagree on the equal time rule because they are a private company, but Facebook recently built a data center in my town, took all of our municipal water supply, won't pay taxes for several years, and is only creating 4 jobs. And we allowed it because of some weird obsession our town had with having a data center here. Democracy...yeah!!!

Screw 'em. If they want to play the corporate welfare game, they can abide by the equal time rule.

kyle82• 10 years ago

They are totally oblivious to their own double standards. Some of the smartest people in the world. That's the tragedy.

roymurdock• 10 years ago

While this may be a more direct or open admission of a "moral" attempt to shape political outcomes, I think it's worth remembering that every other major corporation has its hand in the pot, albeit in a less direct fashion, when its board pours money into lobbyists, special interest groups, and media outlets. Sometimes for "moral" reasons, sometimes for economic reasons - but every major corporation is a political player.

notliketherest4• 10 years ago

As I mentioned in my other comment, we may be fooling ourselves by judging Facebook through the lens of old media or old corporations - there's been a paradigm shift and it needs to be appreciated and judged as such. A free, borderless and global communications platform and service used by 1.5 billion people simply doesn't fit into our classic models of "free speech" and "corporate personhood". I'm not sure what the best approach will be to ensuring their neutrality when it comes to their algorithms, but I think that assurance should exist, ideally in a trustless, provable fashion.

ivanca3• 10 years ago

Just think how unresonable sounds to say "What responsability do we have to stop Hitler?

Poe's law or whatever, but I can't even imagine a worst possible candidate than Trump, even Eric Cartman would be a better president than this Daily-mail-esque cartoon of human being.

rpgmaker• 10 years ago

Trump is a proto-fascist asshole, no doubt about that but when it comes down to it he shared his worst aspects with every major candidate that ran for the GOP nomination this season. The only difference is that Trump didn't play the game how he was supposed to so the media branded him as being particularly evil when he really is embodying the beliefs of the party that he now represents (and that all other candidates paid lip service to in one form or another).

ivanca3• 10 years ago

Downvote all you want, still, it's interesting how no-one took the time to answer the question, if facebook existed back then and had tried to stop Hitler getting to power would that have been Orwellian? It is our duty to always defend democracy even when we strongly presume it will bring destruction and misery?

mwfunk• 10 years ago

I agree with you 100%. At the same time, in this specific situation I can't help but still be even more disturbed at the thought of a Trump presidency than I am by a data hungry, Orwellian, fascist Internet corporation. Not defending the Facebook employee(s) who asked that question by any stretch, just marveling at how screwed up our political system is. :(

SapphireSun• 10 years ago

Facebook's reply: http://gizmodo.com/facebook-says-it-doesnt-try-to-influence-...

avivo• 10 years ago

What if the employees at Facebook instead asked "What ethical responsibility do we have to ensure that we, as the primary distributor of news in the world, do some minimal amount of fact checking."

The goal shouldn't be to "stop Trump" — that's not what we want a news distributor to do. I don't want bias against a particular person in my news distributors. What I want is for my news distributors to actually have ethical standards that enable them to serve the public good (and as a by product hopefully prevent lying demagogue's from gaining power).

Is it "bias" to use a standardized method or algorithm (even one that involves humans reading natural language") to filter content by accuracy and provide some interface indication not just for phishing, and for porn, but also for falsehoods?

morgante5• 10 years ago

Realistically, this is exactly how they would go about trying to stop Drumpf. Plausible deniability and all that jazz.

In fact, decisions which Facebook makes this election season will impact the result regardless of the intentionality behind those decisions. Even something as mundane as the mix between links and images impacts different candidates disparately.

krapp• 10 years ago

There's nothing wrong with asking the question. In a free society, it should be perfectly acceptable to do so without consequence. It would be Orwellian if the question were never even asked.

puranjay• 10 years ago

I'm just amazed at how happy and ignorant people seem to be about giving away Facebook more and more signals about their likes/dislikes

They started the profile badges thing and folks thought that was so cool.

I had to explain to them that this is one more data point for Facebook - if I change my profile badge to a Manchester United logo, it probably means that I really, really care about Manchester United.

I can then be targeted by an advertiser that wants to sell merchandise to Manchester United fans

esailija• 10 years ago

I can then be targeted by an advertiser that wants to sell merchandise to Manchester United fans

And why is this itself a bad thing?

kristianc3• 10 years ago

“It was degrading as a human being,” said another. “We weren’t treated as individuals. We were treated in this robot way.”

Strange that people at Facebook would feel apathetic toward individuals that can't code.

drdeadringer• 10 years ago

Strange that their job was not to code but to do journalistic duties as journalists.

dredmorbius• 10 years ago

Google has this disease quite badly, from multiple sources.

It's pretty common elsewhere in SV as well. And is a cardinal error.

morgante5• 10 years ago

Having worked with journalists, these sound like typical entitlement complaints. Frankly, a lot of writers have an attitude that they're "artists" who shouldn't be rushed and don't have performance requirements.

Frankly, it does not sound very hard at all. They have to write 20 posts a day, but each post is only a headline and a brief summary. A focused writer can finish that in 15 minutes.

We had to write in the most passive tense possible. That’s why you’d see headlines that appear in an alien-esque, passive language.

Oh no! How dare Facebook strive to be neutral and passive.

After doing a tour in Facebook’s news trenches, almost all of them came to believe that they were there not to work, but to serve as training modules for Facebook’s algorithm

Of course they were. Facebook is quite explicitly trying to apply ML throughout their site. Why should they permanently be in the business of employing writers to do something which computers could do reliably and effectively?

SOLAR_FIELDS• 10 years ago

The article also attempts to paint them as overworked and abused and treated differently because they were contractors. Having worked in the big tech industry as a contractor, their description of contractor treatment and workload is pretty normal (no employee perks, quotas, etc.). This is due more to Vizcaino vs. Microsoft [1] than any sort of abusive contractor agenda.

1. http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...

morgante5• 10 years ago

Of course contractors are treated differently. If they were treated identically to employees, the IRS would probably have some questions.

They knew they were signing up for contractor position. Frankly, they were lucky to get any benefits at all.

The article fails to provide any evidence of abuse though. The worst that Facebook did was not inviting them to company happy hours.

kyle82• 10 years ago

I shall just leave a link to Douglas Rushkoff here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87TSoqnZass to explain to you the deep flaws in the "default" techie thinking that your comment is a classic example off.

morgante5• 10 years ago

I stopped at "spiritual deeply humanistic recharge." There's no way I'm watching 90 minutes of BS.

Also, in case it wasn't clear, I have in fact worked at several media companies directly with journalists. I'm not speculating from some distant position about the attitudes of journalists.

If you have an actual point, I'd love to hear it. I don't see how writing basic summaries of the news is a valuable or artistic endeavor.

vcarl• 10 years ago

We had to write in the most passive tense possible. That’s why you’d see headlines that appear in an alien-esque, passive language.

I was just thinking that the Facebook summary headlines are surprisingly journalistic compared to Buzzfeed, Upworthy, etc. Seeing somebody complain about that explains why their title is "news curator" and not "journalist."

krick• 10 years ago

Oh, I would say it's a very "journalistic" complaint, unfortunately. Apparently, there is a fair market for that (given the popularity of sites like newyorker.com on HN), but in general what some journalist wants to write is almost opposite to what I want to read. I want to know news, meaning as short and pointed messages as possible, and "no news today" would be actually a good thing. A journalist who thinks he is "good" (note the "graduated from Ivy League" part) wants presence, wants to be someone, a (or, preferably, "the") trendmaker, the Lord of opinions, like that Spider Jerusalem guy. His ego gets in his way. Which is pretty natural, actually — not only for journalists, but for everyone who wants to be a Person, an Individual, not just a smaller part of the system. Which is actually good, I think, for a human.

It might be somewhat working with printed media and specialized news agencies — after all, agency wants something close to what the journalist wants: to have presence, for public to pay attention to them, not to some other agency. "No news today" would be a disaster for them.

I mean, it's all pretty natural, if we admit that typical news agency's goal is not to "give information". And Facebook's "trending news" section's goal, on the contrary, is quite close to that.

elcapitan• 10 years ago

After having become so annoyed by the buzzfeedization of even traditional news, I was positively surprised when I discovered the "Current Events" page of wikipedia [1], which contains per-day lists of actually relevant stuff (ok, I would take out the crime and sports sections, but that's just me). I would love more neutral, concise media like that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

AndrewKemendo2• 10 years ago

almost all of them came to believe that they were there not to work, but to serve as training modules for Facebook’s algorithm

If Facebook is doing it's job and utilizing their biggest talent acquisition of Yann LeCun, then this is exactly what they should be doing.

A critical part of the path towards AGI is using humans to teach it.

germinalphrase• 10 years ago

Thoughts about the utility of schools to serve this function? We are already teaching humans very simple to very advanced tasks and we do so millions of times a day. Is the fact that tasks/knowledge are being structured for paced human learning irrelevant for this purpose?

aab0• 10 years ago

It's not irrelevant, since there is a minor area of ML called 'curriculum learning' which asks how to order examples to teach a ML algorithm most efficiently, and it comes up in some other contexts (for example, a boosting algorithm which focuses on optimizing performance on hard/misclassified cases can be seen as somewhat like curriculum learning, and there are variants of gradient descent which focus on hard examples rather than wasting time on cases where the NN can already get the right answer; and for 'active learning', you want to pick the example which will teach the algorithm the most), but there's not much you can take from known pedagogy at the moment and apply straight to NNs. Even the non-bullshit parts of education like spaced repetition have no clear analogues for tasks like 'train an RNN to write news headlines based an article text using this corpus of human-written headlines'.

AndrewKemendo2• 10 years ago

In fact, "expert systems" were built around this principle, though generally more in the industrial context.

I don't think that the way knowledge transfer is structured for humans is by default distinct from how we would do it for AI in the long term, but that's a pretty wide range of pedagogy so some tasks make more sense than others for the state of the art today.

In fact the way we train ANN/CNN is similar to how infants & toddlers do early classification. Frank Guerin at the university of Aberdeen has done some study in this area that is in it's early stages.

As far as I know there have not been efforts to set up schools to train AI's from the general population.

The closest thing to it are the efforts by Google and Facebook to train their classifiers (facial recognition, text detection etc...). We are working on an internal process that uses user input to classify objects in the home (furnishings mostly) for auto segmentation and detection.

zxv• 10 years ago

Reducing the number of journalists implies that supervised learning[0] was effective enough to begin to replace some human effort.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervised_learning

morning_star• 10 years ago

why am i reading this

this is the most worthless piece of thing i've ever read in my life

dang• 10 years ago

We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the HN guidelines.

fallenshell• 10 years ago

bless m8

smelendez• 10 years ago

Maybe Facebook should have advertised this as a temporary "Robot Journalist Training Fellowship"

jccalhoun• 10 years ago

why would they hire journalists to do this? It doesn't seem like it takes much skill at all to pick a story and write a short summary of it.

jonathankoren5• 10 years ago

I wonder that myself. I think it has more to do with standard corporate over thinking about what's skills are actually required for a job. It certainly make it easier to say, "We want someone to write titles and snippets of news stories. Who does that? Journalists. Cool, let's get some of those."

disclaimer: i worked on that fb product.

n722• 10 years ago

My guess is they needed the best seed they could generate for their ML algos.

n722• 10 years ago

'Mark Zuckerberg has been transparent about his goal to monopolize digital news distribution. “When news is as fast as everything else on Facebook, people will naturally read a lot more news,”'

Oh lord. That's not news. Those are sensationalist, click baity headlines making us all collectively dumber. It's anecdotal, but I'm quite sure the 'news' my girlfriend has gotten from FB has made her less informed.

I actually wrote an FF plugin to hide that right bar, since I would now and then get sucked in by that crap and waste 15 minutes reading about Lindsey Lohan or whatever.

morgante5• 10 years ago

Actually, I find that the Facebook headlines are much less clickbaity than the predominant headlines from news organizations.

kriro2• 10 years ago

I don't think the assessment that they were part of a future algorithm is too far off. Given enough expert input picking a fitting image/video or headline should be doable. Worst case you reduce the number of humans needed to one quality assurance person. Algorithm says "this headline, this image"...yes/no;fix.

golergka• 10 years ago

So, I got interested in this article's description of horrid working conditions and decided to read about it carefully. But I noticed that it gives emotional descriptions of it long before the actual facts. I wouldn't go as far as calling this a manipulation, but it's certainly a disturbing writing style.

3rd paragraph:

grueling work conditions, humiliating treatment, and a secretive, imperious culture in which they were treated as disposable outsiders.

6th paragraph:

“It was degrading as a human being,” said another. “We weren’t treated as individuals. We were treated in this robot way.”

And then, finally, on 10th paragraphs, we get a glimpse on the facts:

they received benefits including limited medical insurance, paid time off after 6 months and transit reimbursement

(BTW, is it usual for contractors to receive such perks?)

A company happy hour would happen at 8 p.m., and we’d be working

Horrible, inhumane treatment indeed.

Over time, the work became increasingly demanding, and Facebook’s trending news team started to look more and more like the worst stereotypes of a digital media content farm. Managers gave curators aggressive quotas for how many summaries and headlines to write, and timed how long it took curators to write a post. The general standard was 20 posts a day.

20 posts during 8 hour work day is almost half an hour on one post. It is considered too little? Seriously?

So — apart from all the pretty words, I didn't really see any especially bad treatment. Hell, I'm pretty sure that your average newspaper employees have more nightmare stories.

What Happened When Facebook Hired Some Journalists

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