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What Does The News You See On Social Media Drive Your Personal Views?

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To what extent does the news you see on social media drive your personal views? “At Facebook headquarters in California, about 20 engineers and data scientists meet every Tuesday in the “John Quincy Adding Machine” room—“Abraham Linksys” and “Dwight DVD Eisenhower” are nearby. They’re tasked with assessing the billions of likes, comments and clicks Facebook users make each day to divine ways to make us like, comment and click more. In Knoxville, a group of 30 contract workers sit in a room full of desktop computers, getting paid to surf Facebook. They are tasked with scrolling through their News Feeds to assess how well the site places stories relative to their personal preferences. Their assessments, as well as ratings from about 700 other reviewers around the United States, are later fed back to the team in California, all in the service of improving Facebook’s News Feed algorithm, the software that delivers personalized streams of content,” said Victor Luckerson in an article on Time Magazine’s website. In July 2014, Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg apologized after revelations were released that said that the site was experimenting, changing how many positive vs negative stories that were on the News Feeds of about 700,000 users to gauge whether it provoked positive or negative emotional responses. Facebook was accused in early 2016 of only supporting conservative news sites, according to The New York Times, and tampering with the algorithms to lead their users to more

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