cancel
Showing results for 
Show  only  | Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Address politically biased pocket feed

Shrihari
Making moves

I think Firefox is objectively better than the other browsers out there. But I'm seriously considering switching me and my company's primary browser from Firefox to something else because of this.

As a dev who's leading a team of devs (who constantly come and leave the company), it's common for us to buy new devices or factory reset old devices and install Firefox (if not already present). During casual meetings, people keep bringing up extremely biased political feeds by "Pocket", which is completely inappropriate for a work environment. Yes, one can disable "Recommended by Pocket", but a lot of people, myself included, shouldn't be required to do it. It is too much of an ask to expect people to manually turn off politically motivated feeds from the get-go.

One example is that we were recommended an article about "Queerness in India". Now, some of you folks might want to read this at work, or find it appropriate, but you have to understand that not everyone does.

So, the way I see it, there are two ways to go about it. Either make the Pocket feed politically neutral and just remove any politically motivated articles, or potentially lose a portion of the user base in the corporate world who finds it inappropriate. Needless to say, even outside of companies, Firefox will lose users on the other side of the aisle, which would be a shame for a great browser like Firefox.

1 REPLY 1

pikacheww
Making moves

It's not just the bias but the quality of the articles themselves. For example, they continually push articles from Indian news portals that nobody takes seriously which regularly participate in circular reporting. Pocket also regularly pushes op-eds which might as well claim that 2 and 2 is 5. They also have no interest in showing both sides of a story and allowing the reader to make up his/her own take.

It boggled my mind why Mozilla, after repeated request by users, refused to uncouple Pocket from the Firefox browser. However, it all makes sense when you look at the priorities of the Mozilla foundation that this article sheds some light on.

I regularly see articles on Pocket alleging unacceptable levels of "stifling of free speech" in community/nation x, y and z which is quite funny when you find out that some redditors were outright banned from the Firefox subreddit for posting the above mentioned article as many redditors humorously found out here.

As a happy Firefox user since mid 2000s, I was sad to see Firefox moving in the direction of its demise but now? It can't possibly come soon enough.