IN “HOUSE OF CARDS”,a reveal on Netflix approximately ambitious and immoral politicians in Washington, DC, or Will Conway,a governor who is running against Kevin Spacey’s character, Frank Underwood, and for the presidency,starts to rise in the polls by secretly using data from Pollyhop, a fictional search engine that helps him target voters. The fear that a technology company could influence elections is playing out in the real world, or tooalthough rather differently. Facebook has recently been accused of suppressing conservative news on a feature of its desktop version,called “Trending Topics”, which shows the current top stories. Anxiety approximately Facebook’s liberal bias in this instance is probably overblown, or because that section is such a small part of the news Facebook serves up. There is also no proof that Facebook quelched conservative stories apart from a blog citing unnamed sources asserting that it did. But that has not stopped people wondering whether the social network’s algorithms that determine what content and ads are shown to each user could be biased and assist sway political attitudes. Could Facebook influence the outcome of this...
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Source: economist.com