Posted on 05/09/2016 10:32:31 AM PDT by Kaslin
According to Facebook, their trending news list is generated by an algorithm which automatically elevates stories that Facebook users are reading about. Such a list of trending stories does exist at Facebook but it is not the one seen by users. According to a story published Monday by Gizmodo, the public list is hand-selected by a small cadre of news “curators,” many of whom suppress conservative stories that are legitimately trending on the site:
“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” 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. “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.”
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. “I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,” the former curator said.
Steven Crowder, who was singled out here, has published a response of sorts on his website which promises much more to come on this story:
There’s actually a whole lot more going on behind the scenes than I can tell you right now. Yes, there’ve been myriad things going on with Facebook for a very, very long time now. As I’ve covered in detail here “Facebook Is Censoring Louder With Crowder and I Can Prove It.”
[…]
Again, I’m not talking about a “boo-hoo, my blog got censored!” post. What I am talking about, will be a game-changer. Nobody will look at Facebook or social media platforms the same.
Getting back to Gizmodo, in addition to skipping over conservative news stories, Facebook also intentionally avoided placing links to conservative news sites:
Another former curator agreed that the operation had an aversion to right-wing news sources. “It was absolutely bias. We were doing it subjectively. It just depends on who the curator is and what time of day it is,” said the former curator. “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.”
Stories covered by conservative outlets (like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax) that were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook’s algorithm were excluded unless mainstream sites like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN covered the same stories.
Outsourcing Facebook’s news judgment does not improve the situation with regard to bias. Let’s face it, editors at the BBC and the New York Times aren’t inclined to pick up news stories from Breitbart News (full disclosure: my former employer) or Red State. If the right’s media has to get past the media’s left-leaning gate-keepers to gain access to Facebook’s millions of readers it is at an obvious disadvantage. Gizmodo reports it is unclear whether the same sort of effort was made to find neutral sources for trending stories originating at progressive news sites.
The former curators Gizmodo talked to say the bias they observed at Facebook was not an official company policy. As with most media bias, it happened organically as the result of hiring “a small group of young journalists, primarily educated at Ivy League or private East Coast universities.” Needless to say, if you hire a bunch of young progressives to curate the news, the news is going to have a certain slant.
There are really only two ways around this problem (assuming Facebook even sees it as a problem). The first solution would be to intentionally hire curators with some ideological diversity. That means if there are 50 staff members curating Facebook’s trending news, more than 2-3 of them should be conservatives. The other alternative would be to simply let the algorithm work and stop curating at all. That is what Facebook has been telling people, or at least letting them believe, they are getting. Why not give it to them?
Just saw this on Facebook. They do suppress conservative and religious posts, however.
And it could get much worse: if we find out that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ordered this "tweaking" of the News Feed on the behest of the White House, the Democratic National Committee and/or the Hillary Clinton campaign, then it officially becomes a Federal First Amendment case because it is using an instrument of communication to suppress political dissent, something prohibited specifically by the First Amendment.
If I were Jack Dorsey (the CEO of Twitter), Larry Page and Sergei Brin (the co-founders of Google), Satya Nadella (the CEO of Microsoft, who runs the Bing search engine), Sheryl Sandberg (the CEO of Yahoo!), and Evan Spiegel (the CEO of Snapchat), I would be VERY nervous because people are going to start asking questions on whether Conservative views were deliberately suppressed on social media and web search results. And especially if it was done in cahoots with powerful political people on the Left. And Tim Cook (Apple CEO) and Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO) will be asked whether voice command queries with Apple's Siri system or the Amazon Echo device have the same biases.
This is the type of scandal that could cause TREMENDOUS harm to the tech industry in very short order.
I’m not sure why it would.
Most of those folks are regime partisans and several are Obama bundlers.
Do you think Caliph Baraq will sic Loretta Lynch on them?
If you have to use Fakebook, may as well make it behave the way YOU want it to!
I hope you are correct, but those kind of revelations had ZERO impact when the IRS was doing the same thing.
The ‘net IS neutral.
No one is FORCED to use the search engines they are provided.
No one is FORCED to use the search engines they are provided.
True, but the services I mentioned--all extremely popular-- should by definition be politically neutral in the first place. The very fact former Facebook employees mentioned this bias on the News Feed tells me the entire tech industry is culpable--especially when you remember that picture taken some years ago of President Obama having dinner with CEO's of several important tech companies based in the Bay Area.
That's why I say within the next few days watch for a major breaking story in the Wall Street Journal talking about data bias on social media, web search results, voice command search results and even product search results on retail web sites. The fallout could be gigantic, to say the least.
Should be?
By whose rules?
Who has the POWER to enforce it?
A truly democratic 'social media' site would NOT have the 'power' to 'moderate' what was being typed upon it.
Do we REALLY want that?
Is it even POSSIBLE?
Facebook is censoring me!!!!
Sorry, Steve, but on MY computer you are SELF censoring.
YOU are the one who has CHOSEN to place so many time wasting and useless ADs on your webpage; cluttering up what you are trying to get across.
FORCING me (ha ha) to twiddle my thumbs while waiting for the junk to finish before I can finally scroll down to see the rest of what you have produced.
Again; sorry; but I’ve got better ways to waste my time.
Same here, besides not wanting my life broadcast and archived on the internet I honestly don’t have the time for such nonsense.
I always saw it for what it was too: A hip and trendy way to get the lemmings to compile all the data the NSA needs without them having to lift a finger.
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