Why wouldn't Breitbart be on Facebook News? Just about every news site these days is full of strong bias and misinformation - none are objective. They've made it hard to justify why we should listen to any of them.
Just take a look at the NBC scandal with Matt Lauer, or the fake Syrian war footage ABC was spreading around that turned out to be a shooting range in Kentucky. Not to mention the Project Veritas releases concerning CNN and others.
Trust is low with all news organizations and I think The Verge is just continuing to push their own bias onto users with this article.
*edit - I see downvotes but no comments. I'd love to have my mind changed if someone has good reasons other than they don't like right wing media.
NewsGuard gave Breitbart green rating this year, citing that it regularly issues corrections. Facebook's choice of news sources probably works on the same guidelines.
Of course, the good sources are the ones that do not publish errors or misinformation at all in the first place. But if that is used as the criteria, then most of the mainstream media would not even be legitimate candidate.
Downvoted and commented.
-----
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
Jean Paul-Sartre
1. You want representation of both sides of the political spectrum, otherwise you'll be accused of bias. The number of right leaning news sources is relatively few (from what I have observed), I don't imagine there were many for the pick.
2. If you actually read the front page, the majority of their news appears to be reasonably good [1] (at least compared to other popular new sites). It's hardly the Daily Stormer [2].
3. There are more right-leaning people out there than the majority of people realize. In fact, they number roughly half the population in most Countries. As a left-leaning person you should also be aware of what the other side thinks, rather than being subjected to news source that reinforce your own bias.
4. I think the "negative" impact of Breitbart is largely reduced when depicted side-by-side with other sources of news. If anything it simply allows people to know that there is more than one opinion on the subject.
In my experience, the difference between publications isn't so much in the opinions they express, but in which stories they choose to cover. Go to reason.com for stories of government abuse of power, and motherjones.com for corporate abuses. They can cover their stories accurately, but simply by choosing which they cover, they will paint a very different picture of reality.
Well we already know, if you put the ideas of Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler next to those of the Church, and allow the people to figure things out for themselves, it takes a few hundred years. And most often those paths of learning, involve violence and domination by both sides.
Learning takes a long time. People are incompetent at doing it by themselves even with health, wealth and intelligence. They need Skilled Teachers, Coaches and Counselors to do it well, which is why we don't leave kids at the Library for 18 years but at Schools. And even then they take time to learn.
The News Industry never will play that role. But some of them pretend to do it and we can't let them.
I think the left/right debate hides the fact there are a class of people these days who have discovered they can pay their mortgages by pretending to "inform and educate".
They need to be filtered out irrespective of being on the left or right.
The one and only time I looked at Breitbart, because it was mentioned online, must have been around 2015 or so. The news site looked like a UK tabloid/yellow press Fox News clone, nothing special really. I then looked at the public comment section and users there were discussing how to best gas as many Jews as possible in the US. I'm sure they cleaned up the site a bit since then, but this is a true story.
Bottomline of the anecdote is that Breitbart cannot possibly be considered a "high quality news site."
On a side note, from the people who criticize "mainstream media" I have never heard a single halfway sane suggestion of where else you could get news. The best suggestion I've ever gotten was "Wikipedia", and the best wrong answer so far was "books." Most of them don't even seem to know what news are, they seem to confuse the term with "political opinions that I like." We live in crazy times.
> I then looked at the public comment section and users there were discussing how to best gas as many Jews as possible in the US. I'm sure they cleaned up the site a bit since then, but this is a true story.
Yet the founder, Andrew Breitbart, was raised Jewish, the co-founder, Larry Solov, is Jewish, as is the editor-in-chief Alex Marlow, and the senior editor-at-large Joel Pollak. That's 4 out of the 6 key people at Breitbart [1].
In the words of Alex Marlow: "we're consistently called anti-Semitic despite the fact that we are overwhelmingly staffed with Jews and are pro-Israel and pro-Jewish." [2]
> I then looked at the public comment section and users there
> were discussing how to best gas as many Jews as possible
> in the US.
This is the reason that the comments section of almost every news website was removed. Unless you have the resources to moderate the comments, you'll simply end up with ultra polarized views.
> Bottomline of the anecdote is that Breitbart cannot
> possibly be considered a "high quality news site."
Because of a single experience in 2015? I saw this sort of thing on the BBC website too back when they had comments.
> from the people who criticize "mainstream media" I have
> never heard a single halfway sane suggestion of where else
> you could get news.
So, shut up and accept it? I think everybody should be aware of the potential for bias and/or incorrect news produced by mainstream media.
For example, just look at how many mainstream news outlets rushed to "lynch" the Kentucky high school student for supposedly confronting a native American [1]. The large majority of them did zero fact checking. The first rebuttals I saw online came from independent news sources that got hold of the original video and saw how it had been clipped.
It's really the wrong question. Do entities all have to justify why they 'belong' on Facebook? What about vox media? How do they justify that they belong? This is just more cancel culture. Facebook will never be successful putting itself in the middle of a culture war.
Breitbart is a legitimate news agency (you may not like that, but it is). Also, if they left it out lots of people would just howl about how Zuckerberg was catering to liberals. It's as simple as that.
Although I'm much more on the "NYTimes is Truth" side, I read Breitbart daily to gain perspective of what people who voted for Trump think.
Content moderation and factual determination at internet scale in the face of state-sponsored propaganda and multiple divisive nonfactual news agencies is definitely non-trivial. Zuck has started out with a stated philosophy and is attempting to be consistent with it, while also trying to avoid appearance of liberal bias. Some of the consequences of that will not make many people happy.
[+] [-] negzero7|6 years ago|reply
Just take a look at the NBC scandal with Matt Lauer, or the fake Syrian war footage ABC was spreading around that turned out to be a shooting range in Kentucky. Not to mention the Project Veritas releases concerning CNN and others.
Trust is low with all news organizations and I think The Verge is just continuing to push their own bias onto users with this article.
*edit - I see downvotes but no comments. I'd love to have my mind changed if someone has good reasons other than they don't like right wing media.
[+] [-] syockit|6 years ago|reply
Of course, the good sources are the ones that do not publish errors or misinformation at all in the first place. But if that is used as the criteria, then most of the mainstream media would not even be legitimate candidate.
[+] [-] pnutjam|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_gastropod|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bArray|6 years ago|reply
1. You want representation of both sides of the political spectrum, otherwise you'll be accused of bias. The number of right leaning news sources is relatively few (from what I have observed), I don't imagine there were many for the pick.
2. If you actually read the front page, the majority of their news appears to be reasonably good [1] (at least compared to other popular new sites). It's hardly the Daily Stormer [2].
3. There are more right-leaning people out there than the majority of people realize. In fact, they number roughly half the population in most Countries. As a left-leaning person you should also be aware of what the other side thinks, rather than being subjected to news source that reinforce your own bias.
4. I think the "negative" impact of Breitbart is largely reduced when depicted side-by-side with other sources of news. If anything it simply allows people to know that there is more than one opinion on the subject.
[1] https://www.breitbart.com/
[2] https://dailystormer.name/
[+] [-] deogeo|6 years ago|reply
In my experience, the difference between publications isn't so much in the opinions they express, but in which stories they choose to cover. Go to reason.com for stories of government abuse of power, and motherjones.com for corporate abuses. They can cover their stories accurately, but simply by choosing which they cover, they will paint a very different picture of reality.
[+] [-] kibibu|6 years ago|reply
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/heres-h...
[+] [-] hos234|6 years ago|reply
Learning takes a long time. People are incompetent at doing it by themselves even with health, wealth and intelligence. They need Skilled Teachers, Coaches and Counselors to do it well, which is why we don't leave kids at the Library for 18 years but at Schools. And even then they take time to learn.
The News Industry never will play that role. But some of them pretend to do it and we can't let them.
I think the left/right debate hides the fact there are a class of people these days who have discovered they can pay their mortgages by pretending to "inform and educate".
They need to be filtered out irrespective of being on the left or right.
[+] [-] JohnStrangeII|6 years ago|reply
Bottomline of the anecdote is that Breitbart cannot possibly be considered a "high quality news site."
On a side note, from the people who criticize "mainstream media" I have never heard a single halfway sane suggestion of where else you could get news. The best suggestion I've ever gotten was "Wikipedia", and the best wrong answer so far was "books." Most of them don't even seem to know what news are, they seem to confuse the term with "political opinions that I like." We live in crazy times.
[+] [-] deogeo|6 years ago|reply
Yet the founder, Andrew Breitbart, was raised Jewish, the co-founder, Larry Solov, is Jewish, as is the editor-in-chief Alex Marlow, and the senior editor-at-large Joel Pollak. That's 4 out of the 6 key people at Breitbart [1].
In the words of Alex Marlow: "we're consistently called anti-Semitic despite the fact that we are overwhelmingly staffed with Jews and are pro-Israel and pro-Jewish." [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breitbart_News
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Marlow
[+] [-] bArray|6 years ago|reply
> were discussing how to best gas as many Jews as possible
> in the US.
This is the reason that the comments section of almost every news website was removed. Unless you have the resources to moderate the comments, you'll simply end up with ultra polarized views.
> Bottomline of the anecdote is that Breitbart cannot
> possibly be considered a "high quality news site."
Because of a single experience in 2015? I saw this sort of thing on the BBC website too back when they had comments.
> from the people who criticize "mainstream media" I have
> never heard a single halfway sane suggestion of where else
> you could get news.
So, shut up and accept it? I think everybody should be aware of the potential for bias and/or incorrect news produced by mainstream media.
For example, just look at how many mainstream news outlets rushed to "lynch" the Kentucky high school student for supposedly confronting a native American [1]. The large majority of them did zero fact checking. The first rebuttals I saw online came from independent news sources that got hold of the original video and saw how it had been clipped.
[1] https://www.foxnews.com/us/kentucky-student-seen-in-viral-co...
[+] [-] tomohawk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dekhn|6 years ago|reply
Although I'm much more on the "NYTimes is Truth" side, I read Breitbart daily to gain perspective of what people who voted for Trump think.
Content moderation and factual determination at internet scale in the face of state-sponsored propaganda and multiple divisive nonfactual news agencies is definitely non-trivial. Zuck has started out with a stated philosophy and is attempting to be consistent with it, while also trying to avoid appearance of liberal bias. Some of the consequences of that will not make many people happy.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] iongoatb|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chowyuncat|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jjellyy|6 years ago|reply