Since its inception, I’ve noticed that Facebook highlights stories that tend to slant left. I never recall it highlighting something that would make a right-wing politician or pundit look good. It prefers instead to bash people such as Donald Trump and Ann Coulter.<\/p>\n
Gizmodo<\/a>: Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network\u2019s influential \u201ctrending\u201d news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site\u2019s users.<\/p>\n Several former Facebook \u201cnews curators,\u201d as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially \u201cinject\u201d selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren\u2019t popular enough to warrant inclusion\u2014or in some cases weren\u2019t trending at all. The former curators, all of whom worked as contractors, also said they were directed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module.<\/p>\n In other words, Facebook\u2019s news section operates like a traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation. Imposing human editorial values onto the lists of topics an algorithm spits out is by no means a bad thing\u2014but it is in stark contrast to the company\u2019s claims that the trending module simply lists \u201ctopics that have recently become popular on Facebook.\u201d<\/p>\n These new allegations emerged after Gizmodo last week revealed details about the inner workings of Facebook\u2019s trending news team\u2014a small group of young journalists, primarily educated at Ivy League or private East Coast universities, who curate the \u201ctrending\u201d module on the upper-right-hand corner of the site. As we reported last week, curators have access to a ranked list of trending topics surfaced by Facebook\u2019s algorithm, which prioritizes the stories that should be shown to Facebook users in the trending section. The curators write headlines and summaries of each topic, and include links to news sites. The section, which launched in 2014, constitutes some of the most powerful real estate on the internet and helps dictate what news Facebook\u2019s users\u2014167 million in the US alone\u2014are reading at any given moment.<\/p>\n \u201cDepending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,\u201d said the former curator. This individual asked to remain anonymous, citing fear of retribution from the company. The former curator is politically conservative, one of a very small handful of curators with such views on the trending team. \u201cI\u2019d come on shift and I\u2019d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn\u2019t be trending because either the curator didn\u2019t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.\u201d<\/p>\n The former curator was so troubled by the omissions that they kept a running log of them at the time; this individual provided the notes to Gizmodo. Among the deep-sixed or suppressed topics on the list: former IRS official Lois Lerner, who was accused by Republicans of inappropriately scrutinizing conservative groups; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; popular conservative news aggregator the Drudge Report; Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL who was murdered in 2013; and former Fox News contributor Steven Crowder. \u201cI believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,\u201d the former curator said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Since its inception, I’ve noticed that Facebook highlights stories that tend to slant left. I never recall it highlighting something that would make a right-wing politician or pundit look good. It prefers instead to bash people such as Donald Trump … Continue reading