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?
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.
Realistically, the only way for anyone not to seem like they're going out their way to attack Trump during this election is to completely forget about fact checking, because he lies so repeatedly and shamelessly about things he's already been caught out on: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/03/...
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?