Gizmodo Cites Anonymous Sources: Facebook Cooks the Trending Books Against Conservatives

By Rachel Alexander Published on May 9, 2016

Former Facebook employees who worked as news curators have reportedly come forward anonymously and told the design and technology blog Gizmodo various ways they say Facebook skews Facebook’s Trending news against conservatives. “It was absolutely bias,” one former employee told Gizmodo. “We were doing it subjectively. It just depends on who the curator is and what time of day it is.”

Facebook runs “trending” news topics on the right side of users’ homepages, which it says are the most shared news articles on Facebook. However, one of the anonymous former news curators, a self-identified conservative, said that trending stories about conservatives or from conservative websites were often ignored; and employees were sometimes instructed to post stories that weren’t trending, in order to artificially promote topics like Black Lives Matter. Gizmodo notes, “This particular injection is especially noteworthy because the #BlackLivesMatter movement originated on Facebook, and the ensuing media coverage of the movement often noted its powerful social media presence.”

Topics, personalities and sites that were allegedly omitted include the investigation into Lois Lerner, the IRS official who targeted conservatives and Tea Party groups, Scott Walker, Mitt Romney, CPAC, Rand Paul, former Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, former Fox News contributor Steven Crowder and the Drudge Report.

Some of the manipulation appears to have arisen from good intentions. “People stopped caring about Syria,” one former curator said. “[And] if it wasn’t trending on Facebook, it would make Facebook look bad.”

Also, one of the anonymous former employees admitted that the decisions to exclude conservative content were made by the individual news curators, not per instructions from actual Facebook management. Gizmodo reported last week that the news curators are primarily young journalists educated at Ivy League and private East Coast universities — very likely to be progressives. The anonymous conservative former employee said he was one of only a “very small handful of curators with such views on the trending team.”

Other curators interviewed for the story denied the charges of bias, but admitted they were instructed to avoid posting breaking, original articles from conservative news sites and find them instead on longstanding left-leaning sites like The New York Times. 

The breaking story took another turn today when The Weekly Standard reported that the Gizmodo story was trending on Twitter but not on Facebook. A bit later the story was also trending on Facebook. Is Facebook simply a tad slower to flag trends, or was it responding to market pressure by allowing it to appear in its trending column? Hard to say, but one thing is likely: the question will be trending on social media.

Facebook previously made an effort to be fair to conservatives (or at least to appear fair) by hiring Republican Katie Harbath, formerly the chief digital strategist at the National Republican Senatorial Committee, to head up its Politics & Government Outreach Team. Harbath has served as an occasional liaison to the Republican community when issues have arisen about concerns with Facebook.

Facebook issued this response, reported by Tech Crunch:

We take allegations of bias very seriously. Facebook is a platform for people and perspectives from across the political spectrum. Trending Topics shows you the popular topics and hashtags that are being talked about on Facebook. There are rigorous guidelines in place for the review team to ensure consistency and neutrality. These guidelines do not permit the suppression of political perspectives. Nor do they permit the prioritization of one viewpoint over another or one news outlet over another. These guidelines do not prohibit any news outlet from appearing in Trending Topics.

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