| Today's top tech stories - Amazon plans to hire 40,000 corporate workers
- And the e-commerce giant has an answer for its delivery companies that can't hire enough drivers — recruit pot smokers
- Twitter says it will auto-block harassers in an effort to curb abuse
Facebook took a few more swings this past week to try and alleviate one of its biggest headaches: political content moderation. On Tuesday, the company announced that it would start to show some users outside the U.S. fewer political posts in their News Feed. Facebook said it's making the decision based on feedback that some of the signals that power its algorithm aren't working as well as they thought. "We're gradually expanding some tests to put less emphasis on signals such as how likely someone is to comment on or share political content," the company wrote. "At the same time, we're putting more emphasis on new signals such as how likely people are to provide us with negative feedback on posts about political topics and current events when we rank those types of posts in their News Feed." Facebook also is looking into forming an election commission, according to the New York Times. The group would help the company come up with policies related to elections, like how to handle political ads or election-related misinformation. While the existing Oversight Board helps Facebook interpret its rules, this new advisory group would presumably help the company write those rules. Facebook has a lot of political content issues to deal with, including misinformation, whether to allow Taliban accounts, how to decide when political speech causes real-world harm and how to handle political advertising. I think it's positive that Facebook is looking to address them. I'm just not convinced these steps will make much of a difference. Showing users less political content may slightly enhance the Facebook News Feed. I say "slightly" because political content makes up just 6% of what people see on Facebook, the company says. That means a tweak like this may not even register with most users. Plus, a lot of the most polarizing political content – including misinformation – permeates in private groups, where the News Feed algorithm has a lot less impact. This change may mean people see less political content, but won't change how polarizing or divisive that content is. The advisory board idea may be even less likely to help. Facebook already consults outside experts, academics and politicians whenever it makes a major (or even minor) policy tweak at the company. Formalizing these relationships with an advisory board makes sense. Suddenly the company has an outside group of people to point to whenever users disagree with a policy. That's great for Facebook. But the plan raises more questions than it would answer. Which issues would this board weigh in on? Would it apply to elections outside the U.S.? Would Facebook need to set up a different board in every country so that its members understand the intricacies of a local election?
Perhaps most importantly: Will Facebook's board come to any actual agreements? If politicians rarely (if ever) agree on how to create rules around election ads, misinformation and voting language, it feels unrealistic to expect that a group commissioned by Facebook will have a lot more luck. In the meantime, Facebook still has some tough decisions to make.—Kurt Wagner Marc Lore, known for starting Diapers.com, wants to build a Utopian technocity. Robinhood plans an early deposit feature that rivals PayPal. Intuit is in talks to buy email marketing company Mailchimp for more than $10 billion, in an effort to expand its services to small businesses. Meme stock Alfi's facial recognition advertising technology is raising concerns among privacy advocates. | 
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