Facebook and Twitter control the news, and this is bad news
Selon Emily Bell du The Guardian, les processus éditoriaux ne devraient pas être contrôlés par des algorithmes.
L’actualité sur beaucoup de plateformes de ce genre est déterminée par l’ampleur des réactions de ses utilisateurs, ce qui pourrait renvoyer à l’ombre d’importantes discussions sociétales.
Un écosystème qui préférencie certaines catégories de news peut être une menace pour la démocratie.
Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci noted after the riots in Ferguson that although many news items were being posted to Facebook, she initially saw none of them in her feed, just ice bucket challenges. That led her to speculate that algorithmic filtering could potentially mute important stories.
[...]
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp and what’s next are and will continue to be making editorial decisions on our behalf. [Dick] Costolo [Twitter CEO] taking his first editorial stance is significant because he was public and unapologetic about removing material that he felt did cultural and economic damage to Twitter. The Facebook algorithm, and other sorting processes, are both more opaque and less accountable. The decline of the newspaper, and the subsequent closure or shrinking of newsrooms, not only leaves news unbound, it also removes the culture of editorial filtering. Centuries of human debate over cultural values, expressed in everything from intrusive splashes to grandiose editorials, are disappearing to be replaced by a black box.
"We can’t let tech giants, like Facebook and Twitter, control our news values" : ▻http://www.theguardian.com/media/media-blog/2014/aug/31/tech-giants-facebook-twitter-algorithm-editorial-values/print
#democracy #démocratie
#news #media
#algorithm
#censorship #censure
