Earlier this year Facebook announced that it would begin ranking news outlets by how “trustworthy” and “high quality” they are. The kinds of implicit biases and lack of subject matter expertise that biased Facebook’s Trending Topics against Africa are difficult to catch without external expertise. Or, the company could simply manually adjust the outlet’s ranking. After all, it is doubtful indeed that Facebook set out to purposefully exclude Africa from its Trending Topics module. Most importantly, Facebook’s effort appears to be focused on generating a single score per outlet that ranks the news outlet as a whole across all its coverage.

Source: Forbes May 03, 2018 13:30 UTC