At an innovation conference in Pittsburgh on Thursday, President Barack Obama shared some of his ideas on what he described as the “wild, wild west” media environment in the United States. Obama said that the American media environment gives conspiracy theorists and others who spread misinformation a broad platform, which Obama argued could possibly be […]

In a note on Facebook, Dan Rather expressed concern about the transparency of Facebook’s “mysterious algorithms,” while noting the benefits of Facebook for news : “I … worry about the opaqueness of Facebook and its mysterious algorithms. My team and I try to figure out why some posts seem to ‘hit’ and are shared thousands […]

“Before Gizmodo published allegations that Facebook’s editors were biased, no one thought much about the “Trending” stories the site promotes in the top-right corner of its home screen,” Caitlin Dewey writes, but the section’s mishaps shows the fallibility of algorithms. To better understand what kinds of news stories and topics the trending news section tends […]

You might have heard: Trying to get rid of human bias in its trending topics, Facebook announced it would no longer longer employ humans to write descriptions for the section, but just three days after that announcement, the trending news section include a fake news story claiming Megyn Kelly had been fired from Fox News […]

The Associated Press, which routinely covered some minor league stories through the 2006 season, will produce the stories using technology from Automated Insights and data from MLB Advanced Media, which is the official stat-keeper of the minor leagues. Automated game stories are available for Triple-A, Double-A and Class A games, covering 142 MLB-affiliated teams and […]

You might have heard: Facebook’s trending news section is controlled by a group of contractors who curate the news, who have a list of “preferred media outlets” they’re encouraged to choose from But did you know: Several former Facebook news curators for the site’s trending news section say they regularly suppressed news stories of interest […]

Launched in January 2014, Facebook’s “trending news” section appears in the top right hand corner of your news feed. That section is controlled by a group of news curators who are contractors for Facebook, working out of a basement in Facebook’s NYC office, Gizmodo reports. After seeing a list of topics ranked by Facebook’s algorithm, […]

According to a spokesperson for VG Media, German publishers have filed a complaint against Google, claiming that the search engine should pay to show their articles online. VG Media, which is a consortium of 200 publishers, says that Google does not want to pay to show its publishers’ content: “So bringing a civil claim before […]

The European Commission announced on Wednesday it will examine whether news aggregation services such as Google News should pay to displaying snippets of news articles. This comes after some of Europe’s largest publishers such as Axel Springer and News Corp called on the EU to rein in aggregation sites such as Google News, which they […]

Ad Replacer, a new ad blocker for Google Chrome created by aggregation news site Inside.com’s founder Jason Calacanis, will replace ads with “human-curated news.” Ad Replacer curates content from sites such as BBC, Variety, The Verge and CNN, and is powered by people who are curating content 24/7. Calacanis is billing Ad Replacer as an […]