Facebook's (FB) attempt to remove bias from its Trending feature by automating it may not solve the problem, according to one artificial intelligence start-up.
"It's an interesting challenge, because it speaks to the problem of our algorithms," said Byron Galbraith, chief data scientist of Talla. "The data that drives the algorithm is inherently biased."
The problem with using a formula to curate news is that it is reliant on the data it is given, Galbraith said. For example, studies have shown that feminine names when put in current algorithms tend to be associated with topics around the home or occupations like nursing or teaching, he said. Masculine names are connected with professions like lawyers or doctors. Neither slant may ultimately reflect the interests of an individual reader.
"Even though the math part of the data is unbiased, if the data encodes these social biases, it's hard to get away from that," Galbraith said.
On Friday, Facebook announced on a blog post that it would be automating its Trending section. The change would remove the need for people to write descriptions for trending topics.
Instead of seeing a topic and a sentence about why it was newsworthy, users will now see a key term and the number of people talking about that topic on Facebook. Hovering over the phrase will show a description pulled from one of the articles being shared on the social network. Clicking on topic will show a list of news articles and posts shared by users around the issue.
"It will help distance Facebook from accusations of bias," said Matt Lang, a senior digital strategist at digital agency Rain.
Part of why people are up in arms is that Facebook is a platform that is just serving up content but now it's being seen as a curator of content, Rain's Lang said. As people bring in fictitious stories and exaggerate things on their personal news feeds, the social network will need quality assurance from human teams as it "trains" technology to figure out what is reliable and not.
"I think it's early days, and they have work to do to clean it up," Lang said. "The sources themselves, which are the primary source for Trending content, those publishers and sites have bias. It's always going to have to involve some element of oversight to make sure the publication that is trending is not overly biased."
Already, this past weekend a false story about Megyn Kelly being fired from Fox News began circulating. It was accepted by Facebook as a legitimate topic, but was ultimately discovered to be a hoax.
The only way to counter these problems is to employ people to skew the equations to be more "balanced," said Talla's Galbraith.