I did a story yesterday about some anonymous Facebook contract workers that were told to censor conservative news stories while working for the social media giant. They were told which stories to put into the “trending section.” However, the trending section is supposed to show strictly what people are searching for the most.
One former employee said to Gizmodo:
“I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC [Conservative Political Action Conference] 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.”
Facebook has denied the allegations saying that they have rigorous standards to keep the feed objective. Here is what they said in a statement:
“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. 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.”
Another anonymous employee had the opposite opinion of the trending news section. He said that the trustworthiness of news topics was based on how many times they appeared on the major news outlets.
When the conservative news outlets had a major story, some of the employees were told to promote those same stories from a less biased website.
Josh Constine of TechCrunch said the report of Facebook’s activity was completely anecdotal. It is hard to tell if the stories were actually suppressed. It’s also hard to tell if it was just conservative news stories. If you have a human picking news stories, there is bound to be some bias.
Conservatives have long decried the liberal bias on Facebook. For more on this topic, see the video below:
Featured image by Sarah Marshall via Flickr, available under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
