Name: Facebook Is Denying That it Tampers With Trending Topics
Uploaded: 2016-05-12
Duration: 3 min 43 s
Description: And that it ignores conservative news

[ SOUND ] Okay. This is kind of a big story. I almost don't know where to begin, but Andrew, first things first. Is this really happening, Facebook is denying but do we think that there's some truth to this? Well, it's really hard to say. I mean, yes you said, Facebook is denying it. But the truth of the matter is, there are humans That are doing some element of curation here and you know we're humans, nothing is perfect. There is no machine to say what's liberal, what's conservative so. But the accusations here go beyond that, is that someone is deliberately suppressing area. I think, yeah the thing is though you have to think about this is one article And it sites person who admits that they are conservative, they won't go on the record though, it's off the record. And it's a person saying, I'm conservative and I felt pressure, maybe not even explicit to suppress certain conservative news sources. So it might not be institutional so much as one persons feelings. That have been blown up into a giant, national, multi- day news story. Right, it was a one source story. This is a very good point. But Andrew, it also brings up, what is Facebook? I mean, not to get all meta and here I am holding this thing looking at Facebook live, but Does this company need to fess up and face the facts, so to speak, that it is a media company? No one would complain if Rupert Murdoch slapped a story on the front page of the New York Post with a bent. Or the same thing with the Salzburgers. Is this what we're looking at now with Facebook? Well Facebook is, in fact a media company. But it's never gonna to say that because it's got such a lofty Valuation in the public markets, I mean why would you wanna be a media company, when you can be a technology company, why would anybody wanna be anything but a technology company in the 21st century. So, I think with Facebook the real Thing that's uncomfortable here is, yes it controls this much of our lives. Yeah, absolutely. We have a question here from Facebook. Is there political risks here for Facebook stock? What do you think? I mean the connection between the stock market and the political road is a little bit sort of Hard to make. I mean, what we do is that Facebook and a lot of Silicon Valley tech companies over the recent years have realized how important it is to be politically engaged. They used to kind of just ignore DC and say okay, those guys are handling their thing, we're gonna build our Perfect Utopia world here in Silicon Valley. And they're realizing that because of how big and powerful they are and what economic forces they are. They have to actually engage in DC. Google has a huge lobbying team now. Facebook is also kind of doing that too and You're seeing them run into governments around the world, especially Facebook most notably in India. I think there is definitely some benefit to them being closely connected to DC, and Facebook is actually trying to do that. You can see they're sponsoring the GOP convention for example. Right. They've sponsored a lot of the Republican debates. Facebook wants to be seen as politically engaged, but most of all as neutral. Right, absolutely. Andrew, the other question that I had this week is that now the Senate commerce committee is looking into this, John [ UNKNOWN ] Does government have a right to even go there. And say, no company X you should be doing this not this. I mean this is a private company. What are your thoughts on that? I mean they can look and poke around it. Whatever they like. But there's this thing called the First Amendment. [ LAUGH ] Right. And Facebook can basically do whatever it likes. You know? I mean We want Facebook to be neutral. We want them to have a nice balance of conservative and liberal news and these kinds of things, but let's not forget. Facebook is just a product, and they can make their product however they like. And some of this is catnip for the conservative coalition. I mean they love playing the role of the underdog. And yet another Mainstream media member is coming after us. Right, they're being victimized. Yeah. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]