Raise your hand if this comes as a shock to you.
A journalist who used to work at Facebook has revealed that news curators at the social media company regularly blocked conservative stories from trending.
In an interview with Gizmodo published Monday morning, this former journalist said that stories about CPAC, Mitt Romney, and Rand Paul, among other topics, were not allowed to “trend” on Facebook, despite their having met all the criteria for a story to be listed as highly influential.
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In fact, not only did news curators apparently block conservative news sites, they also regularly boosted unpopular stories into the trending news feed, so as to push a narrative.
This practice occurs even though Facebook insists that it curates only stories that become popular on their own.
“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” the former curator told Gizmodo. “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.”
“I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,” the former curator added.
Whenever a conservative news outlet broke a story, curators would see if they could find that same story on other more liberal sites. They would then link that site instead of the conservative one.
However, it seems this practice was a function of individual bias at Facebook, rather than the result of a directive coming from management, with the exception of instructions to make stories trend that weren’t popular enough to do so on their own.
“Facebook got a lot of pressure about not having a trending topic for Black Lives Matter,” the curator told Gizmodo. “They realized it was a problem, and they boosted it in the ordering. They gave it preference over other topics. When we injected it, everyone started saying, ‘Yeah, now I’m seeing it as number one.’”
A previous piece from Gizmodo found that these curators were contractors, not employees, and were hired from elite Ivy League schools, in addition to other private schools on the east coast.
Facebook had little to say in response to the story Gizmodo broke last Tuesday, simply stating:
We don’t comment on rumor or speculation. As with all contractors, the trending review team contractors are fairly compensated and receive appropriate benefits.
How’s that for a non-answer?
This report, by Jonah Bennett, was cross-posted by arrangement with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
