Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing Conservative Political Action Conference. Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.
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.”
Like other big businesses the media is now owned by rich people who presumably have a good reason for buying in to TV or news organisations. To make a big thing of bias at Facebook is ridiculous. Does anyone seriously think that the Murdoch media empire offers unbiased news? At the very best one has to read news with a hefty dose of suspicion. The old days when a reporter told it as it was is long gone. In Britain bias is a given. The way the Daily Telegraph reports news inevitably reflects the bias of the staff and the prejudices of the readers. And no doubt other readers think the Guardian is biased in the opposite direction. This is where education comes in. An educated person, taught to think for himself, can look behind the headlines and ask, “Why are they featuring this? From whose perspective is it being written? Whose interests are being represented? In Washington I ask myself these questions every morning of the Washington Post (owner: Jeff Bezos, from Amazon).