Take Two translates the day’s headlines for Southern California, making sense of the news and cultural events that affect our lives. Produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from October 2012 – June 2021. Hosted by A Martinez.
It was a big shock to some people when they heard the charge: Facebook routinely censored conservative news.
That's the allegation published in Gizmodo, which talked to people who formally worked for Facebook. They claimed they curated what would trend and what didn't. And conservative news often didn't.
U.S. Senator John Thune has even launched an inquiry into the practice.
But it's shed a light into what we expect from social media.
USC journalism professor Mike Ananny says he routinely encounters students who believe Facebook and other sites are automated, run by machines and pulling content from your own friend groups.
But he has to remind them that social media sites are run by humans, and the algorithms that build their feeds are made by humans, too.
Those people might be engineers and software developers, and not trained with journalism ethics.
Ananny joins Take Two to explain more about our relationship with Facebook and how we get our news.