Interesting items

Some items I've found interesting related to the Facebook news feed changes last week.

• Back in October 2017 the effects of Facebook using nation states as experiment groups to collect data on a significant change to the way news appeared on feeds were first reported.
• The primary source for the announcement of the feed change is a Facebook post from Mark Zuckerberg on 11 Jan. However, Wired linked to a PDF transcript of a November quarterly call with Facebook's investors as an early sign of this change.
• Most of the coverage I've looked at naturally reflects my western, developed nation, bias. The World Service's Business Daily put more time into perspectives from other parts of the world.
• To reinforce the somewhat strange scale at which this is playing out, Mark Zuckerberg's former mentor Roger McNamee is using national media outlets such as MSNBC television and The Washington Post to try and reach out to him.
• As a sign that this might have a positive effect, an article on Vice's Motherboard hopes that in the long term this will have a beneficial effect on content quality. Meanwhile the Guardian is moving increasingly to a subscription funded model and receives more income from readers than it does from advertisers.
• There's a lot of talk of "Facebook's Algorithm" but rather than a defined set of rules as we'd traditionally understand, it will be a deep learning neural network. Computerphile has a good explainer on how this builds connections between inputs and - something I found very helpful to understand this subject better - a visualisation of what's happening inside a neural network.
• I've outlined how I consume long form content such as news.