Online news bias a real concern
Picture yourself standing in front of a row of newspaper boxes on a street corner in downtown Toronto. You see the Toronto Star, the National Post and the Toronto Sun. (You probably don’t see the Globe and Mail because despite its designation as “Canada’s Flagship Newspaper” it’s often harder to find on a city street than a parking spot).
You notice that each paper, like an online dating profile, has its own distinct voice and agenda. There’s “Earnest liberal seeks institutional change” (the Star); “World-weary conservative seeks status quo” (the Post); and everyone’s guilty pleasure, “Fun-loving wacko seeks tickets to the Blue Jays game” (the Sun).
Each paper has its own ideology, which, when presented side by side on the same street corner, provide for the consumer a free lesson in media literacy.
But breaking news: that lesson may not be long for this world.
This is because today, news, especially when read by young people, isn’t for the most part consumed as a consistent narrative under the banners of well-known print or website institutions, but piece by piece and soundbite by soundbite on social media.
More specifically it is often consumed on Facebook, a website that provides an ongoing series of news stories on its “trending topics” sidebar. According to a study by the Media Insight Project and the American Press Institute, “Fully 88 per cent of millennials get news from Facebook regularly, and more than half of them do so daily.” In other words, Facebook’s trending sidebar is the modern equivalent of that corner crowded with newspaper boxes.
The problem is, on that traditional corner consumers could judge the slant of the stories they were reading by the name on the box they were in. On Facebook’s “trending” corner, if a slant exists it is hidden, and possibly insidious.
A bit of background: In a story this week on the tech website Gizmodo, an anonymous source who worked at Facebook as a news curator alleged that the site’s team in charge of “trending” topics had wilfully blocked conservative news from appearing in the “trending” sidebar, even when that news was genuinely popular. (The trending sidebar, for those who don’t use Facebook, is a list that features, via algorithm, news stories that Facebook users discuss on the site in great numbers.)
The source also alleged that his co-workers “injected” liberal topics into the trending sidebar that weren’t at the time genuinely trending (such as Black Lives Matter). The slant and bias of the sidebar wasn’t reflective of Facebook users at large, the source claimed, but of the curators in charge of the sidebar.
Facebook vehemently denies this allegation.
“There are rigorous guidelines in place for the review team to ensure consistency and neutrality,” a Facebook spokesperson told the Star. “These guidelines do not permit the suppression of political perspectives. Nor do they permit the prio- ritization of one viewpoint over another or one news outlet over another.”
But what if they did? Facebook isn’t a news outlet, true, and thus has no official responsibility to curate news in a balanced fashion. But if it’s at least possible for a major social network — Facebook or otherwise — to “cook” the trend stats to suppress or promote information and ideas, should we not be at least a little concerned? Especially when we are made to believe that those ideas rise naturally, via user engagement, to the top of the trends heap?
In the traditional media world the truck just dropped off all the papers and ideas on the corner, and we judged them — and their biases — accordingly. In the new world, if a trend curator decides he doesn’t like a whole swath of ideas he could hypothetically make them go away (he could deliver the Star for example, but drive the Sun into the garbage dump).
This doesn’t mean biased social media operatives are about to erase entire political viewpoints from the Internet; but the possibility that they might suppress even one idea in their news curating should spark the question: in the absence of “ana- log” media literacy (scanning the headlines at the newspaper box lineup, for example) what can we do to ensure that a new “digital” media literacy emerges? What can we do, in other words, to ensure that consumers of news question not only the accuracy and biases of press publications, but the biases of the curators picking and peddling that press?
In Canada, where millions of kids begin using the Internet in Grade 4 we could institute a nationwide media and digital literacy program in schools, a tool that would give kids a necessary “life skill,” says Matthew Johnson, director of education at Media Smarts, an organization based in Ottawa that teaches students media literacy across Canada.
Being “an informed citizen,” says Johnson, “means being digitally literate.” And a central part of that in this day and age means not taking “trends” at face value.
No, media literacy doesn’t sound as vital as gym class or as essential as math — but in a world of constant, fragmented news, fiery opinion and seemingly benign social media corporations, it really is. Emma Teitel is a national columnist.