Why doesn't Facebook simply filter out politics?
This post was also published in VentureBeat. As the adage goes, don’t discuss politics or religion at the dinner table. Facebook’s genesis was for friends and family to share what was going on in their lives. Yet over the past couple of years, many Facebook newsfeeds have turned into “Trumpbook,” with a stream of outrage-focused political posts fueling Facebook interactions, especially during election cycles. Facebook first claimed that its fake news issue was “crazy” , then repeatedly stated that their algorithm could discern fake news , and has since changed its tune — it has a war room where armies of contractors analyze ads and posts for validity. But with recent advancements in machine learning, it is now possible to algorithmically filter out political news and advertisements using off-the-shelf machine learning algorithms. Topic categorization algorithms have been successfully identifying content for years and have become increasingly sophisticated and turnkey. The