UPDATE May 10: A senior Facebook staffer has made a lengthy denial of the bias claims.
He said “Facebook does not allow or advise our reviewers to systematically discriminate against sources of any ideological origin”, and says he has seen no evidence that it happens.
———
Original story:
In a recent Gizmodo article, anonymous former Facebook employees detail the bias, both implicit and explicit, that staffers running Facebook’s “trending” news section have exhibited against both conservative news outlets and stories of interest to conservatives.
These “news curators,” as they are labeled by the company, would actively ignore news items about conservative events and politicians from Facebook’s trending list.
Facebook is a site used by 167 million people in the U.S. alone, and any topic on their trending list can instantly become a nationwide discussion.
“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” an anonymous source told Gizmodo. “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.”
Not only did they discriminate against conservative news items, they would not include articles from conservative sources like Breitbart and The Washington Times. If a story was not covered by at least two mainstream news sources like CNN or The New York Times, it would not make the trending list.
Facebook curators ignored some stories while “injecting” stories they felt were important. At times this was to keep up with topics gaining traction on Twitter, but sometimes it was to increase Facebook’s esteem as a “hard news source.” According to the Gizmodo story, curators would insert trending topics about Black Lives Matter and Syria even when the topics were not widely discussed by Facebook users.
Curators were also actively discouraged from adding Facebook stories to the list without multiple levels of approval. The system made it virtually impossible for a negative story about the company to trend on its own site.
Facebook has received pressure from liberal groups to drop support for the Republican National Convention in July in opposition to Donald Trump. Facebook maintains that it will not back out and will provide both “financial and other support.”
The social network wishes to maintain the veneer of political neutrality and perhaps this decision could be tied to the allegations of Facebook’s political bias.
