I’ve long noticed that Facebook tilts left in the stories it promotes. <\/p>\n
Gizmodo: Facebook Employees Asked Mark Zuckerberg If They Should Try to Stop a Donald Trump Presidency<\/a> <\/p>\n This week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared to publicly denounce the political positions of Donald Trump\u2019s presidential campaign during the keynote speech of the company\u2019s annual F8 developer conference.<\/p>\n \u201cI hear fearful voices calling for building walls and distancing people they label as \u2018others,\u2019\u201d Zuckerberg said, never referring to Trump by name. \u201cI hear them calling for blocking free expression, for slowing immigration, for reducing trade, and in some cases, even for cutting access to the internet.\u201d<\/p>\n For a developer\u2019s conference, the comments were unprecedented\u2014a signal that the 31-year-old billionaire is quite willing to publicly mix politics and business. Zuckerberg has donated to campaigns in the past, but has been vague about which candidates he and his company\u2019s political action committee support.<\/p>\n Inside Facebook, the political discussion has been more explicit. Last month, some Facebook employees used a company poll to ask Zuckerberg whether the company should try \u201cto help prevent President Trump in 2017.\u201d<\/p>\n …More than 1.04 billion people use Facebook. It\u2019s where we get our news, share our political views, and interact with politicians. It\u2019s also where those politicians are spending a greater share of their budgets.<\/p>\n And Facebook has no legal responsibility to give an unfiltered view of what\u2019s happening on their network.<\/p>\n \u201cFacebook can promote or block any material that it wants,\u201d UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh told Gizmodo. \u201cFacebook has the same First Amendment right as the New York Times. They can completely block Trump if they want. They block him or promote him.\u201d But the New York Times isn\u2019t hosting pages like Donald Trump for President or Donald Trump for President 2016, the way Facebook is.<\/p>\n Most people don\u2019t see Facebook as a media company\u2014an outlet designed to inform us. It doesn\u2019t look like a newspaper, magazine, or news website. But if Facebook decides to tamper with its algorithm\u2014altering what we see\u2014it\u2019s akin to an editor deciding what to run big with on the front page, or what to take a stand on. The difference is that readers of traditional media (including the web) can educate themselves about a media company\u2019s political leanings. Media outlets often publish op-eds and editorials, and have a history of how they treat particular stories. Not to mention that Facebook has the potential to reach vastly, vastly more readers than any given publication.<\/p>\n With Facebook, we don\u2019t know what we\u2019re not seeing. We don\u2019t know what the bias is or how that might be affecting how we see the world.<\/p>\n Facebook has toyed with skewing news in the past. During the 2012 presidential election, Facebook secretly tampered with 1.9 million user\u2019s news feeds. The company also tampered with news feeds in 2010 during a 61-million-person experiment to see how Facebook could impact the real-world voting behavior of millions of people. An academic paper was published about the secret experiment, claiming that Facebook increased voter turnout by more than 340,000 people. In 2012, Facebook also deliberately experimented on its users\u2019 emotions. The company, again, secretly tampered with the news feeds of 700,000 people and concluded that Facebook can basically make you feel whatever it wants you to.<\/p>\n If Facebook decided to, it could gradually remove any pro-Trump stories or media off its site\u2014devastating for a campaign that runs on memes and publicity. Facebook wouldn\u2019t have to disclose it was doing this, and would be protected by the First Amendment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve long noticed that Facebook tilts left in the stories it promotes. Gizmodo: Facebook Employees Asked Mark Zuckerberg If They Should Try to Stop a Donald Trump Presidency This week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared to publicly denounce the political … Continue reading