Facebook’s Trust Problem Needs A Transparency Overhaul

Posted on by Emily Temkin

Remember when Facebook was just a fun place to catch up with friends? Now it’s a little bit of a content free-for-all. Today, in the era of digital espionage, where more and more people are trying to abuse social media platforms with nefarious motives, Facebook has not kept up with the needed transparency to maintain consumer trust.

What’s making Facebook a little creepy? Its algorithms. 

Here’s the recap: Facebook has created a formula to decide what should be included, and prioritized, in all of our newsfeeds. Its formula, or algorithm, is in the spotlight as it has been blamed for virilizing fake news. Business editor for Mashable, Jason Abbruzzese states, “algorithms alone are not yet good enough to determine when something is a mistake or on purpose.” Since the algorithm can not determine the accuracy of a news source, Facebook needs to avoid promoting media that has not yet been confirmed, which is why Mark Zuckerberg has pledged, “to focus on fixing these important issues” in 2018.

However, marketers and publishers are not pleased with Facebook’s mission to ameliorate their algorithm, since it will prioritize posts from family and friends above brands. But not all brands; while mashable.com and independent.co.uk are expected to face large traffic losses from the algorithmic shift, the NY Post and MSN are expected to gain traffic through these changes.

Zuckerberg talks of this issue as a, “personal challenge”, since it is hard to please both the advertisers and users, but if you ask me it’s rather simple. If you explain to Facebook users the algorithm in simple language, and give users the ability to adjust their personal algorithm the problem disappears. If people want to see content from certain marketers they can specify that by adjusting their algorithm to make their own unique news feed.

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