社交媒体的算法正在潜移默化地塑造着我们所认知的“世界”。微博的推送、微信的广告、脸书的新闻，都是如此。点击量越高，表明你越感兴趣，越喜欢，因此就愈加频繁出现在你的推送上。久而久之，小圈子的回音壁现象产生。会不会有一天，我们都在自己被筛选过的微博推送里看新闻，并可能渐渐就这么认为，这就是全世界呢？
作者：Sue Halpern
译者：王乐颖
校对：文诗韵
策划：文诗韵
Facebook's Fake News Fix
脸书新闻打“假”
本文选自
NYR Daily
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When Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared with his (then) 101,545,240 followers that his New Year’s resolution for 2018 was “to fix” Facebook, one might have asked, “Fix it for whom?” It is a question with a number of possible answers: for its shareholders, who saw growth level off in the last year and young people turning to other social media platforms; for its users, who saw their personal information appropriated by political operatives and sometimes used against them in insidious ways; or for the public more generally, which is living with the consequences of that
appropriation
and with the proliferation of propaganda,
camouflaged
as legitimate news, not only in the United States, but in countries such as Burma and South Sudan, where Facebook-generated “fake news” has been used to instigate ethnic violence.
脸书网创始人兼CEO马克•扎克伯格和（当时）101,545,240名粉丝分享自己2018的新年愿望：整改脸书网。看到这条状态的时候，人们可能会想：“整改服务的对象是谁？”这个问题有着许多可能的答案。股东们看到的是去年增长率降低，年轻用户转向其他社交媒体平台；用户则发现他们的个人信息被挪用作政治操纵，并且有时，被卑鄙阴险地用来对付他们自己；或者更广义地，就大众的立场来看：他们承受着个人信息被
挪用
以及
披着
合法新闻
外衣
的政治宣传四处泛滥所带来的后果。这种情况不仅出现在美国，脸书网上产生的“假新闻”在缅甸、南苏丹等国家已经成为挑起种族暴力的武器。
camouflag
e
[ 'kæmuflɑ:ʒ ]
n. the disguising especially of military equipment or installations with paint, nets, or foliage;
also :
the disguise so applied. 伪装，掩饰
Let’s be cynical for a moment. Coming just weeks after a
contentious
hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence—where Senator Dianne Feinstein held the cudgel of regulation over the heads of representatives from Facebook, Google, and Twitter, telling them that if their companies did not “do something” about the manipulation of their platforms by foreign agents, “we will”—Zuckerberg’s New Year’s resolution could also be interpreted as his personal response to Feinstein’s threat. After all, his company spent more than $8.4 million last year deploying a brigade of thirty-six lobbyists to walk the halls of Congress defending Facebook from government interference. A New Year’s resolution is a lot cheaper, and it gives its author 364 days to make good.
让我们“愤世嫉俗”一会儿。参议院情报特别委员会几周前刚刚举行了一次
颇具争议
的听证会，参议员戴安•费恩斯坦对来自脸书、谷歌和推特的代表举起了法规的杀威棒。她告诉他们，如果这些公司不对外国势力操纵自家平台的行为‘采取行动’，‘联邦政府会。’扎克伯格发表的新年愿望也可解读为可能是他个人对费恩斯坦威胁的回应。毕竟，脸书公司去年花了超过840万美元雇请足足36名说客游说专家在国会为脸书辩护，并阻止政府干涉脸书的行动。相比之下，新年计划的性价比就高多了，还能给表决心的人再争取364天的时间。
And it took only a week for Facebook to offer up its fix. It did not come from Zuckerberg directly, but from Adam Mosseri, the company’s Head of News Feed.
并且，脸书在短短一个星期内就提出了整改方案。这个方案不是由扎克伯格本人，而是由公司新闻推送主管亚当•莫赛里提出。
The Facebook news feed is not, as its name suggests, a compendium of topical stories from various news media. Rather, it is a collection of posts from one’s Facebook “friends,” from sites one has actively “liked,” from third-party sites that Facebook believes you’re interested in based on your previous online behavior, and from advertisers who have put you into a category that, theoretically, makes you predisposed toward buying what they are selling. None of this is random. Everything that appears in the news feed is there because Facebook’s
proprietary
algorithm has put it there. That algorithm sorts through and analyzes masses of digital signals, deciding which of your friends’ posts you’d most like to see and which silly cat videos and other material from greater Facebook will grab your attention. It then serves these up along with a slew of paid advertisements, delivering to two billion people a never-ending supply of individualized, targeted content.
脸书新闻推送内容和字面意思不同。它整合的不是来自各个新闻媒体的时事报道，而是用户好友的状态、频繁点赞的界面、和脸书根据历史上网行为判断用户会喜欢的第三方网站，还有那些把你列入潜在客户范围的广告商们。所有这一切都不是随机的。一切出现在新闻推送中的内容都是由脸书经
独家
算法后呈现的。这一算法仔细挑选并分析大量数据信息，判定你最想要看到哪个朋友发的状态、哪个搞笑猫咪视频，还有其他脸书网上最可能吸引你的内容。随后，算法会把这些内容和大量付费广告一起呈现给20亿脸书用户，为他们提供无穷无尽个性化、定位精准的内容。
proprietary
[ prəu'praiətəri ] adj. Protected by trademark or patent or copyright; made or produced or distributed by one having exclusive rights. 所有的, 私人拥有的.
Mosseri began his message
reiterating
the company’s aspirational
mantra
.
“Facebook was built to bring people closer together and build relationships,” he wrote. “One of the ways we do this is by connecting people to meaningful posts from their friends and family in News Feed.” And then he described—in vague terms—how the company would be tweaking its algorithm so that “people have more opportunities to interact with the people they care about.” To accomplish this, he said, the algorithm will “predict which posts you might want to interact with your friends about and show these posts higher in [the] feed.” So what will fuel this prediction engine? According to Mosseri, “posts that inspire back-and-forth discussion in the comments and posts that you might want to share and react to.” He also said that the news feed would carry less public content, “including videos and other posts from publishers.”
莫赛里开篇重申了公司的老一套愿景：‘脸书网创始的目的是让人们更亲密，增建关系，’他写道。‘我们采取的方法之一就是让人们在新闻推送中更多地看到来自家人、朋友发表的重要状态。’随后他含混地描述了公司是如何利用算法，让人们‘有更多机会和自己在乎的人互动’。为了达到这个目的，算法会‘预测你会和好友就哪条状态进行互动，进而让这些状态在推送中的排位更靠前。’那么这种预测的机制的动力是什么？莫赛里说，是‘能够让人在评论区热烈讨论的状态和用户可能会想要分享、做出回应的状态。’他还说，新闻推送中的公共内容较少，‘包括视频和其他
来自新闻媒体的文章。’
reiterate
[ ri:'itəreit ] v. to say, state, or perform again. 重申；反复地做
mantra
[ 'mæntrə ] n. a commonly repeated word or phrase. 咒语，颂歌
In the days following, much was made of the impact this algorithm adjustment will have on third-party sites, especially news organizations, which have come to rely on Facebook for traffic (and, therefore, ad revenue). This is a legitimate worry, especially for legacy journalism, which struggled to adapt to the mobile digital world and found a workaround through Facebook. Then, a week later, Mark Zuckerberg announced a further fix, this one an attempt to limit the amount of “fake news”: Facebook will survey its users, asking them to rank the “trustworthiness” of various news sources. Those with higher rankings will get priority in the news feed, while those with lower scores, presumably, will be shut out. As a consequence, Zuckerberg said, the amount of news on Facebook will decline by 20 percent.
之后的几天，人们充分讨论了算法调整对第三方网站，尤其是新闻机构造成的影响。这些机构仰仗脸书网引流（因此也倚赖脸书网带来营收）。这一担忧不无道理，尤其是对那些挣扎着适应移动数据时代，终于在脸书上找到一条出路的老派新闻机构。一个星期之后，马克•扎克伯格宣布了进一步的改进措施。这一措施的目标是改进减少“假新闻”的数量。脸书网会进行用户调查，请他们对各种新闻来源的“可信度”进行评价。得分高的媒体会在新闻推送中具有优先级，而那些得分低的媒体可能会被过滤。扎克伯格说，结果是脸书上的新闻量可能会减少20%。
There is no way to know, yet, if outsourcing discernment—if that’s what polling a random collection of two billion people is—will cut down on the amount of propaganda, lying, and deception on Facebook, or if such a survey will simply replicate existing ideological divisions. But it is also unclear where the more than 50 percent of Facebook users who get their news from the site will get it now, if anywhere, since there will be so much less of it. And maybe that is the point. This diminution of news might be a way for Facebook to walk away from the public sphere—or, at least, appear to walk away—at a time when it has been taken to task for its
overweening
influence there. As Slate’s chairman and editor-in-chief, Jacob Weisberg, told The New York Times, downgrading news content also benefits the company in those countries where independent journalism is outlawed.
我们现在无法得知通过20亿人口的随机调查而获得的外包信息甄别，是否真能减少脸书上各种营销、谎言和欺骗，或者这一举措仅仅是单纯复制现存的意识形态分歧。如果脸书上的新闻总量将大幅减少，我们也不确定过去以脸书作为主要新闻来源的用户（这一群体比例超过50%）日后获取的信息会出自何处。这可能就是问题所在。在脸书不得不应对它因为
过分夸大
的新闻引导而给公共领域带来的影响时，减少新闻推送对它或许会是一个抽身的办法，或者至少展现出了一种姿态。就像《批判》主席、主编雅各布•韦恩斯伯格在《纽约时报》所说的一样，减少新闻内容对在那些独立新闻运营违法的国家的公司有好处。
‘Facebook is just desperate to get into China, and it will never do that unless it censors news—and this is actually a neat solution to that,’ Weisberg said. ‘If you only have news on the platform shared by users, users who live under repressive regimes don’t have access to real news and can’t share it, because it’s legally prohibited.’ But even in the United States, where publishers were already tailoring content so it might rise to the top of the news feed, Facebook’s pivot to the personal may encourage more stories about the Instant Pot, for example, and fewer analyses of Middle East policy, since one is more likely than the other to be shared, promoted, and drive traffic. Call it censorship by a thousand clicks.
“脸书用尽一切办法想打入中国市场，但如果不审查新闻，它的目标永远不可能达成——新引进的算法是一个非常棒的解决方法，” 维斯伯格说。 “如果平台上只有用户分享的新闻，那用户就无法接触到被法律禁止的新闻，更无从分享。”但即使是在美国，报社也已经开始为在新闻推送量身打造首页文章。打个比方，脸书对个人喜好的偏重会鼓励更多和高压锅有关的文章，更少中东政策的分析，因为与后者相比，前者被分享、推广从而拉动流量的可能性更高。这可以叫做“千次点击审查制度”。
A few months ago, Facebook experimented with a similar algorithm modification in six countries, removing all professionally-produced journalism from the news feed and sequestering it in its own marginal tab called “Explore.” That tweak, like the one announced last week, prioritized posts from friends and family over other kinds of information. The result was disquieting. It made it more difficult for users to find trusted news sources on the platform, kept official announcements
at bay
, and, rather than eliminating fake news, in some instances exacerbated it.
几个月前，，脸书在六个国家进行了类似算法调整的实验，把所有专业新闻报道从新闻推送中移除，把这些内容移到“探索”这个边缘功能中。这个调整就和上周宣布的一样，让来自朋友和家人的状态拥有比其他信息更高的优先级。调整的结果令人不安。它让用户更难在平台上找到可信赖的新闻，让官方公告无法传播；这一算法不但没有消灭假新闻，还在某种情况下促进了其传播。
at bay
adj. forced to turn and face attackers. 陷入绝境
This should not have been difficult to predict. It stands to reason that giving priority to posts from friends that generate lots of back-and-forth will do nothing to curtail the proliferation of fake news. If I post something provocative and unsubstantiated that I heard from someone else, and many of my Facebook friends comment on it and pass it along to their friends and those users also comment on it, the new algorithm should be primed to make that information go viral. And if what I say to you, and you say to me, and our friends say to each other, makes it to the top of our news feeds by dint of this new “engagement” algorithm, then Facebook’s
echo-chamber effect
, where like-minded people talk only among themselves, will be more resonant, not less. Connections may be solidified and alliances cemented, but so will divisions and polarities. (On the other hand, if the new algorithm also prioritizes “happy” content—graduation announcements, birthday wishes, job promotions—over other kinds of exchanges, then the news feed will become the Internet equivalent of the Hallmark 1 card aisle in the supermarket, and Facebook will go the way of MySpace and AOL.)
这一情况其实不难预料。让好友之间多次互动的状态具有优先级并不能减少假新闻的传播。如果我发表了一条从别人那里听来、很有煽动性但毫无现实依据的内容，我的很多好友又对它进行了评论、转发给他们的好友，而这些朋友的朋友也发表评论的话，新的算法会让这条消息在网络上病毒式传播。又比如，我和你聊天的内容、你和我聊天的内容、我们的朋友彼此之间相互交谈的内容被这个新的“互动”算法推上了首页，最后脸书的
回音壁现象
（一群思想相近的人只和自己的群体交流）会越来越严重，而不是减轻。这可能会加强联系、巩固感情，但也会加剧隔阂和分化。从另一个角度来说，如果新算法同时让诸如毕业宣言、生日愿望和工作升职这一类“开心”时刻比其他类型的消息更具有优先级，那么新闻推送就变成了互联网版的超市好码客祝福卡专列，脸书也会步MySpace和AOL后尘，走上衰落的道路。
Hallmark Cards：美国最大的祝福卡片制造商
MySpace： 早期社交媒体网站之一，05-08年之间是世界上最大的社交媒体网站， 但经营不善，2008年被脸书超越
AOL（美国在线）：美国互联网先驱之一，也曾是美国最著名的互联网服务提供商
In the meantime, all this personal content, including our journalism preferences, may have another effect, that of delivering more of ourselves—our interests, desires, movements, passions, and emotions—to Facebook and the data brokers that, in turn, sell it to governments, credit agencies, political operatives, and marketers. Is there any doubt that connections are the currency of Facebook—or that they are in large part responsible for the company’s $500 billion valuations? And about those marketers: missing from Facebook’s “fix” is any mention of advertising. This is a fundamental omission, given that Facebook, despite its founder’s insistence that his company exists to connect the people of the world, does not just happen to run a side-hustle selling thing to fund his humanitarian project, but, rather, is the second largest advertising platform on the planet. All of the connecting that is done there is done in the service of all its advertising since Facebook users are both the customer (who buys things) and the product (who provides the raw data that enables advertisers to target users with such precision). That is the real genius of Facebook, and why the company is so valuable.
