There are many assumptions on whether Facebook is a biased social media platform. Many users questioned why their posts were flagged or removed for illegal content when they would post anything slightly conservative.
Finally, workers have stepped out and spoken on what was really going on behind the scenes in Facebook.
Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” 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’s users.
Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t 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.
These new allegations emerged after Gizmodo last week revealed details about the inner workings of Facebook’s trending news team—a small group of young journalists, primarily educated at Ivy League or private East Coast universities, who curate the “trending” 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’s 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’s users—167 million in the US alone—are reading at any given moment.
This has been a concern of outlets on the right for some time about the new moves and the “strikes.” So, this adds fire to those concerns, if there were employees actually acting this way behind the scenes.
New scoops are reportedly coming this week with more bombshell information.
Meanwhile, Texas passed a law to prohibit Facebook, Twitter and Google from removing conservative viewpoints, and they were sued in response by the companies. Now a federal district court has ruled allowing Texas to get limited discovery from the companies on how they moderate content. That means that they could see, effectively, how they are making those judgements and for what reason they are suppressing to censor people/groups.
