Facebook has become the largest social network on the planet. They have over 1.7 billion active users as of the first quarter of 2016.
Some former Facebook employees have been exposed for suppressing conservative-centric news stories in the “Trending” section. This section is used to show the types of news stories that are the most popular at the moment. It tells you what many people are searching for online.
As much as I don’t like most of the things the Republican party does, I still don’t want to take away someone’s free speech rights.
Several former Facebook “news curators” were instructed to inject stories into the trending section that were not really trending. They were also told not to include things about Facebook itself. So, the trending section was meant to be what is actually popular online, but it turned into a traditional newsroom-type organization. The trending section is supposed to be objective.
The curators were given a list of topics that were trending and told to write a headline and short description for each one. This is the prime online real estate for a publisher’s work to be shown.
A former employee, who is remaining anonymous due to fear of retribution, kept a running log of things that were “blacklisted” from the trending section.
Some of these included:
- former IRS official Lois Lerner
- Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker
- Chris Kyle (former NAVY seal who was murdered)
- Steven Crowder (former Fox News contributor
The former curator said:
“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.”
So, I still love Facebook, but some of these dealings seem kind of shady. If you’re going to be a liberal news organization, the name of your organization should say so, like Liberal America. See how that works?
For more on liberal bias in the media, see below:
Featured image by Christopher via Flickr, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.
