Why Do We Care If Facebook Is Biased?

The “trending” section of Facebook—the space on the top right-hand side of the page where you can read about what’s happening in the world—functions sort of like the front page of a newspaper. But if you compare it to the cover of an actual national newspaper you won’t see much overlap. On Tuesday morning, the top articles on the front page of the print edition of the Times were about Donald Trump’s uncomfortable attempts to court the Republican establishment and about the legal battle over a North Carolina law regulating which bathrooms transgender people can use. When I opened Facebook that afternoon, the top trending topics included the news that Eva Mendes and Ryan Gosling had, according to TMZ, given birth to a child (Amada) and that the “Guinness Book of World Records” had anointed the oldest living cat (thirty years old, Siamese).