This story will not come as a shock to those of you on the right who are media-savvy but to the low information crowd it may be a bit of a surprise, assuming that they are paying attention. Gizmodo reports that they have spoken to a number of former Facebook employees who say that the tech giant routinely suppressed news that did not serve the liberal-leftist agenda of its owner and his Democrat pals. Stories that would have shown up as trending would be killed and phony trending items would be put in their place. It’s a classic case of media bias.
The average Facebook user would not know that they were fed a controlled diet of liberal-leftist approved stories and prevented from seeing those reports that did not serve the liberal agenda. Of course Facebook is a privately owned company and they can do what they want, just like any other member of the legacy media might do. But they are going to have some difficulty maintaining the fiction that they are free from bias and not politicizing their platform given the testimony from these former workers.
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.
In other words, Facebook’s 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—but it is in stark contrast to the company’s claims that the trending module simply lists “topics that have recently become popular on Facebook.”
