Reuters Institute for the study of Journalism: If one believes the numbers attached to Facebook, then the world's most powerful news executive is Greg Marra, the product manager for the Facebook News Feed. He is 26.
In a recent piece in the New York Times, Marra was quoted as saying: “We try to explicitly view ourselves as not editors,” he said. “We don’t want to have editorial judgment over the content that’s in your feed. You’ve made your friends, you’ve connected to the pages that you want to connect to and you’re the best decider for the things that you care about.” However, even by making the decision that people see news based on their social circles, Marra and his colleagues have made a profound editorial decision which has a broad societal impact.
‘We don’t want to have editorial judgment’. This is a refrain one hears over and over again within Silicon Valley companies: We are ‘just a platform’, the ‘technology is neutral’; ‘we don’t make editorial decisions’. I truly think engineers believe this although it is demonstrably wrong.
Every time an algorithm is tweaked, an editorial decision is being made.
In a recent piece in the New York Times, Marra was quoted as saying: “We try to explicitly view ourselves as not editors,” he said. “We don’t want to have editorial judgment over the content that’s in your feed. You’ve made your friends, you’ve connected to the pages that you want to connect to and you’re the best decider for the things that you care about.” However, even by making the decision that people see news based on their social circles, Marra and his colleagues have made a profound editorial decision which has a broad societal impact.
‘We don’t want to have editorial judgment’. This is a refrain one hears over and over again within Silicon Valley companies: We are ‘just a platform’, the ‘technology is neutral’; ‘we don’t make editorial decisions’. I truly think engineers believe this although it is demonstrably wrong.
Every time an algorithm is tweaked, an editorial decision is being made.