Bias or Balance?

@_KarenHao has written a detailed exposé of Facebook's approach to ethics. In addition to some useful material about political polarization, which I have discussed in previous posts, the article contains some insight into the notion of bias preferred by Mark Zuckerberg and Joel Kaplan (VP Global Public Policy). 

The article describes the work of several ethics teams within Facebook, including SAIL (Society and AI Lab) and Responsible AI. There were various challenges that these teams identified as important, including polarization and misinformation. However, because of Kaplan’s and Zuckerberg’s worries about alienating conservatives, they were directed to focus on algorithmic bias.

Narrowing SAIL’s focus to algorithmic fairness would sideline all Facebook’s other long-standing algorithmic problems. Its content-recommendation models would continue pushing posts, news, and groups to users in an effort to maximize engagement, rewarding extremist content and contributing to increasingly fractured political discourse.

The Responsible AI team produced a tool called Fairness Flow, intended to measure the accuracy of machine-learning models for different user groups. The research team took the view that

when deciding whether a misinformation model is fair with respect to political ideology, ... fairness does not mean the model should affect conservative and liberal users equally. If conservatives are posting a greater fraction of misinformation, as judged by public consensus, then the model should flag a greater fraction of conservative content. If liberals are posting more misinformation, it should flag their content more often too.

But according to Hao, Kaplan's team took the opposite view:

they took fairness to mean that these models should not affect conservatives more than liberals. When a model did so, they would stop its deployment and demand a change. Once, they blocked a medical-misinformation detector that had noticeably reduced the reach of anti-vaccine campaigns, the former researcher told me. They told the researchers that the model could not be deployed until the team fixed this discrepancy. But that effectively made the model meaningless.

On this evidence, Facebook seems to be following pretty much the same narrow approach to balance and impartiality that responsible news organizations claim now to be trying to move away from. Perhaps the most egregious example of this approach in recent times was the coverage of climate change. For many years, the BBC felt it necessary to invite a climate change denier to debate any discussion of climate change. In 2018, they acknowledged that this was a mistake.

Politicians often complain to news organizations that their party is being treated unfairly. The traditional belief is that if you are getting similar numbers of complaints from both sides, you are probably getting things about right. However, this assumes that politics is symmetrical, with exactly two sides to any given argument. Professor Angela Phillips, one of the founders of the Media Reform Coalition, quotes research from Loughborough University showing that the BBC’s obsession with balance took Labour off air ahead of Brexit, because of the belief that a fair balance between Remain and Leave could be largely achieved by close coverage of the conflicts within the Conservative party.

One politician who has regularly complained about a lack of coverage on the BBC is Nigel Farage. Writing from a Scottish Nationalist perspective, the Jouker argues that the BBC responds to such complaints by giving him the oxygen of publicity he craves, while denying equivalent or fair coverage to the SNP. And as Simon Read notes,

It was the mainstream media that gave Mr Farage all the publicity he has wanted over the past couple of decades, including a record number of appearances on the BBC’s Question Time and his own show on radio station LBC. ... Without a doubt, he is the establishment – apart from his failure to become an MP despite 25 years of trying – and to paint himself as otherwise is rather disingenuous.

Stuart Cosgrove argues:

Due impartiality is one of the load-bearing props of the BBC’s producer guidelines. Not only is it a concept that is easily unpicked, I would argue that it has run its course as a guiding principle and is now singularly unsuited to a society where the media is fragmented, where views do not sit comfortably on the see-saw of balance and when the digital world has disrupted television’s authority.

Quite so.

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Damian Carrington, BBC admits we get climate change coverage wrong too often (The Guardian, 7 September 2018)

Centre for Research in Communication and Culture, Media Coverage of the EU Referendum 5 (Loughborough University, 27 June 2016)

Stuart Cosgrove, Emily Maitlis row exposes BBC's outdated obsession with due impartiality (The National, 31 May 2020)

Karen Hao, How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation (MIT Technology Review, 11 March 2021)

Angela Phillips, How the BBC’s obsession with balance took Labour off air ahead of Brexit (The Conversation, 14 July 2016)

Simon Read, Beware Farage's advice (FT Advisor, 21 October 2020)

The Jouker, BBC has explaining to do over record Farage Question Time appearance (The National, 10 May 2019)

See also tweet by @leobarasi via @tonyjoyce

Related posts: Polarization (November 2018), Polarizing Filters (March 2021), Algorithmic Bias (March 2021)