
Mark Zuckerberg is struggling to explain why Breitbart belongs on Facebook News - smacktoward
https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/25/20932653/facebook-news-breitbart-mark-zuckerberg-statement-bias
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negzero7
Why wouldn't Breitbart be on Facebook News? Just about every news site these
days is full of strong bias and misinformation - none are objective. They've
made it hard to justify why we should listen to any of them.

Just take a look at the NBC scandal with Matt Lauer, or the fake Syrian war
footage ABC was spreading around that turned out to be a shooting range in
Kentucky. Not to mention the Project Veritas releases concerning CNN and
others.

Trust is low with all news organizations and I think The Verge is just
continuing to push their own bias onto users with this article.

*edit - I see downvotes but no comments. I'd love to have my mind changed if someone has good reasons other than they don't like right wing media.

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syockit
NewsGuard gave Breitbart green rating this year, citing that it regularly
issues corrections. Facebook's choice of news sources probably works on the
same guidelines.

Of course, the good sources are the ones that do not publish errors or
misinformation at all in the first place. But if that is used as the criteria,
then most of the mainstream media would not even be legitimate candidate.

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bArray
The answer to me seems quite clear:

1\. You want representation of both sides of the political spectrum, otherwise
you'll be accused of bias. The number of right leaning news sources is
relatively few (from what I have observed), I don't imagine there were many
for the pick.

2\. If you actually read the front page, the majority of their news appears to
be reasonably good [1] (at least compared to other popular new sites). It's
hardly the Daily Stormer [2].

3\. There are more right-leaning people out there than the majority of people
realize. In fact, they number roughly half the population in most Countries.
As a left-leaning person you should also be aware of what the other side
thinks, rather than being subjected to news source that reinforce your own
bias.

4\. I think the "negative" impact of Breitbart is largely reduced when
depicted side-by-side with other sources of news. If anything it simply allows
people to know that there is more than one opinion on the subject.

[1] [https://www.breitbart.com/](https://www.breitbart.com/)

[2] [https://dailystormer.name/](https://dailystormer.name/)

~~~
deogeo
> more than one opinion on the subject.

In my experience, the difference between publications isn't so much in the
opinions they express, but in which stories they choose to cover. Go to
reason.com for stories of government abuse of power, and motherjones.com for
corporate abuses. They can cover their stories accurately, but simply by
choosing which they cover, they will paint a very different picture of
reality.

~~~
bArray
For sure - but this is precisely the reason we should all reach for a wide
variety of sources. Your typical left-wing news source might choose not to
publish a story critical of left-wing politics for example, whereas Breitbart
would likely jump on the opportunity. Breitbart on the other hand might choose
not to be critical of right-wing political stories.

As my parents once told me as a child, the truth is often somewhere in the
middle.

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JohnStrangeII
The one and only time I looked at Breitbart, because it was mentioned online,
must have been around 2015 or so. The news site looked like a UK
tabloid/yellow press Fox News clone, nothing special really. I then looked at
the public comment section and users there were discussing how to best gas as
many Jews as possible in the US. I'm sure they cleaned up the site a bit since
then, but this is a true story.

Bottomline of the anecdote is that Breitbart cannot possibly be considered a
"high quality news site."

On a side note, from the people who criticize "mainstream media" I have never
heard a single halfway sane suggestion of where else you could get news. The
best suggestion I've ever gotten was "Wikipedia", and the best wrong answer so
far was "books." Most of them don't even seem to know what news are, they seem
to confuse the term with "political opinions that I like." We live in crazy
times.

~~~
bArray
> I then looked at the public comment section and users there

> were discussing how to best gas as many Jews as possible

> in the US.

This is the reason that the comments section of almost every news website was
removed. Unless you have the resources to moderate the comments, you'll simply
end up with ultra polarized views.

> Bottomline of the anecdote is that Breitbart cannot

> possibly be considered a "high quality news site."

Because of a single experience in 2015? I saw this sort of thing on the BBC
website too back when they had comments.

> from the people who criticize "mainstream media" I have

> never heard a single halfway sane suggestion of where else

> you could get news.

So, shut up and accept it? I think everybody should be aware of the potential
for bias and/or incorrect news produced by mainstream media.

For example, just look at how many mainstream news outlets rushed to "lynch"
the Kentucky high school student for supposedly confronting a native American
[1]. The large majority of them did zero fact checking. The first rebuttals I
saw online came from independent news sources that got hold of the original
video and saw how it had been clipped.

[1] [https://www.foxnews.com/us/kentucky-student-seen-in-viral-
co...](https://www.foxnews.com/us/kentucky-student-seen-in-viral-
confrontation-with-native-american-speaks-out)

~~~
JohnStrangeII
> _Because of a single experience in 2015?_

No, because it is basically a tabloid/yellow press version of Fox News and Fox
News is already very low quality in terms of actual informativity - too much
editorializing, combined with garbage interviews. I thought the latter was
somehow implied, but should have been much clearer about it.

> _This is the reason that the comments section of almost every news website
> was removed._

Breitbart hasn't removed theirs, though. I just checked and the first comment
on the first randomly chosen story was that "Hussein Obama created ISIS" with
the reply "This. We need to exterminate the enemy within" \- talking about
assassinating a former president.

The comments are atrocial, check them out for yourself. And these are
Breitbart's readers.

> _I think everybody should be aware of the potential for bias and /or
> incorrect news produced by mainstream media._

Your position is not very coherent, because you are (i) agreeing that there is
no viable alternative to "mainstream media" (most of the time, you can only
correct them on the basis other mainstream media), and (ii) everybody is
biased, has always been, and will always be. It matters how you deal with your
biases, not that you don't have biases. I can get my news from the most biased
news site on earth - Breitbart or Fox News or CNN, if you will, and be fully
informed, as long as I'm able to distinguish news from editorials. It's no
problem nowadays, with access to multiple news sources on the Internet. That
doesn't make the source high quality, though.

In the end, _all the news_ comes from journalists who film, photograph, write
news at the place where something happens or as close as possible to it. New
agencies and a few larger papers/TV channels can afford a large network of
correspondents and freelancers - the remaining news provider just
copy&paste/paraphrase, including Breitbart, of course.

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tomohawk
It's really the wrong question. Do entities all have to justify why they
'belong' on Facebook? What about vox media? How do they justify that they
belong? This is just more cancel culture. Facebook will never be successful
putting itself in the middle of a culture war.

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dekhn
Breitbart is a legitimate news agency (you may not like that, but it is).
Also, if they left it out lots of people would just howl about how Zuckerberg
was catering to liberals. It's as simple as that.

Although I'm much more on the "NYTimes is Truth" side, I read Breitbart daily
to gain perspective of what people who voted for Trump think.

Content moderation and factual determination at internet scale in the face of
state-sponsored propaganda and multiple divisive nonfactual news agencies is
definitely non-trivial. Zuck has started out with a stated philosophy and is
attempting to be consistent with it, while also trying to avoid appearance of
liberal bias. Some of the consequences of that will not make many people
happy.

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jjellyy
Breitbart is mainstream conservative ...

