Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, go ahead. For our listeners who haven’t been tracking, there was basically… There are mixed feelings about how true it is but basically not in the news feed itself but in the little trending news widget on desktop on the top right or on mobile when you tap into an empty search field, you see the hand curated top news that Facebook thinks you would be interested. The news story basically alleges that they had talked to someone who used to work on that team and they said it was anti-conservative, and the blowup from that has been unbelievable. The interesting takeaway is boy, if the blowup from that little thing has been that big, that little thing that half of you probably haven’t even seen and most of you probably have never clicked on, people give Facebook a tremendous amount of credit for having this agnostic algorithm. So can you imagine if they were doing anything in the news feed algorithm to tilt one way or another. I mean they’re viewed as like this arbiter of the truth and there’s this pure clean algorithm that decides what you look at. And I think that trust that they have instilled in people is powerful. A crack has emerged though in the past month. Let’s see what happens.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.