Facebook Suppressed Conservative News, Former Employees Say
Facebook suppressed stories conservative news sources, stories that would otherwise interest conservative users, from its popular “Trending Stories” feed, according to unidentified current and former employees.
As Gizmodo reports, Facebook’s “Trending Stories,” launched in 2014, ostensibly leads users to news stories that other users are sharing with each other and talking about.
Facebook uses a proprietary computer program to determine which stories are trending. From there, a handful of programmers — called “curators” within the company — are responsible for writing a headline, summarizing the story, and inserting a link to the stories, before installing them on the users’ Facebook pages.
According to Gizmodo, that little box of stories on the upper-right corner of your Facebook screen is “some of the most powerful real estate on the internet.” Approximately 167 million Facebook users in the U.S. alone glance at that screen to see what might interest them.
And according to some current and former curators, Facebook has tried to make sure that conservative stories that might interest users are excluded from the list.
A former curator, who asked not to be identified, said that stories from conservative sources such as Breitbart or the Blaze, or stories about conservative topics of interest such as Mitt Romney or Sarah Palin, were “blacklisted,” and he or she was forbidden from putting them in the Trending Stories list even though they were trending.
“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending. I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz. I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news.”
@gatewaypundit @AndrewBreitbart Breitbart would be leading the conservative charge against the liberal Trump. pic.twitter.com/3neningM56
— Ex-GOP for life (@RealWomenVoters) May 7, 2016
Another curator said that Facebook would sometimes allow stories trending on conservative sites if and only if another, more traditionally liberal source, such as the New York Times, were covering the story as well.
“It was absolutely bias. We were doing it subjectively. It just depends on who the curator is and what time of day it is. Every once in awhile a Red State or conservative news source would have a story. But we would have to go and find the same story from a more neutral outlet that wasn’t as biased.”
Whether or not Facebook was specifically censoring conservative stories as part of a company-wide attempt at censorship is a matter of dispute. The former curators interviewed by Gizmodo say it was just a matter of which curator was working at the time and his or her own personal bias.
Still, Gizmodo notes that the vast majority of Facebook curators are young journalists educated at Ivy League or East Coast universities, a pool of potential employees that is typically not known for being conservative.
Harvard student Sam Koppelman on the tyranny & persecution he faces as a Clinton supporter https://t.co/yJ6Qr6EFmU pic.twitter.com/a7cpxuOs1c
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 8, 2016
Besides outright suppression of conservative news stories, Facebook management instructed curators to manipulate the Trending Stories list in other ways. Stories about Facebook itself, for example, were typically blacklisted. Similarly, if a Facebook manager deemed a story “important,” even if it wasn’t trending organically, curators were instructed to artificially inject it into the list.
For example, stories about the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines’ MH370 were artificially injected into the list even though those stories were not trending organically.
Do you believe Facebook has been deliberately suppressing conservative news stories?
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