analysis | What Facebook's news suppression reveals about our relationship with machines

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

On Monday, technology news site Gizmodo published an article alleging the routine suppression of conservative news from its “Trending” news aggregator by a group of curators instructed to manipulate the list from behind the scenes. Setting aside many of the partisan issues surrounding the controversy, what the “man behind the curtain” really reveals is our intricate relationship with—and misguided perception of—computers and machines.
Like the famed Wizard of Oz, many have assumed the algorithm curating the Facebook news feed is exactly that—an algorithm. Mathematical. Precise. Impartial.

Perfect.

As it turns out, the algorithm is tended to by a small cadre of trained journalists. It may indeed be out of necessity, as Facebook is bound to argue in its defense. The algorithm may be too unsophisticated, its results too clunky to be set loose without moderation. Experiments like Tay AI serve as proof of the volatile nature of machine learning.

The idea that a machine can aggregate your news is logical nowadays. Siri, now owned by Apple, was one of the first mass-market introductions to the possibilities of an intelligent assistant, and that was four years ago. A slew of others followed, including Google Now and Amazon’s Alexa. We assume that technology has advanced in such leaps that an algorithmic news site is impartial by default. We don’t consider the potential of human bias; sometimes the thought of manipulation does not even occur to us. After all, if a machine can both find me directions and drive me there, why can’t it curate my news?

This is not the first machine to be unmasked in such a fashion. By coincidence, Bloomberg recently revealed how “intelligent assistants” are sometimes anything but, and in certain instances are little more than a chat application masquerading as an automated bot.

AI, in other words, is hard. And sometimes, it’s not quite there yet. But revelations like these show us both the seductive power and the crippling limitations of new technology. And it serves as a warning to always be aware there might be something behind the curtain.