Alex Stamos, Facebook's chief security officer, went on a long tweetstorm Saturday in defense of the company's algorithms and use of human news curators in the heat of investigations into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election, TechCrunch reported.
Stamos apparently was set off by Washington Post contributor Quinta Jurecic, an associate editor at Lawfare, writing that Facebook's shift toward human editors for its news feed says that "the algorithm is bad now, we're going to have people do this," TechCrunch stated.
Facebook announced in September that it was turning over 3,000 online political ads purchased through Russian accounts during the presidential campaign to congressional investigators, The Washington Post wrote. The social media site said last year that it would hire 3,000 content monitors in an attempt to root out fake news after automated systems failed to solve the problem, the newspaper stated.
Stamos followed with a series of Twitter posts.
Tom McKay, of the website Gizmodo said that Stamos' argument makes light of Facebook's role in solving the fake news problem.
"But the meat of Stamos' argument underplays the reality that Facebook has become so huge and so powerful that management struggles to define exactly what it is and what it intends to accomplish — and that while the company faces potential criticism if it overreaches in combating misinformation and abuse on the platform, its current problems very much do relate to its preference for the inverse, hands-off solutions which often boil down to relatively small tweaks," McKay wrote.
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