Facebook and its Liberal Media Bias

Recently, Facebook has come under fire for possibly censoring conservative news outlets in its members’ timelines.

Websites such as Breitbart News, Drudge Report and Infowars have reported that they believe their stories are being “tuned out” by Facebook content editors who instead promote news and links to progressive and social justice warrior (SJW) sites.

Breitbart’s editor-in-chief Alex Marlow said that “Facebook’s trending news artificially mutes conservatives… Facebook claims its algorithm simply populates ‘topics that have recently become popular on Facebook’… but now we know that’s not true.”

Republican Senator John Thune of South Dakota has demanded answers from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about multiple reports from the tech website Gizmodo by former Facebook employees that claim in the site’s Trending Topics conservative content is “routinely” suppressed. Which then amplifes content from liberal and social justice sources such as Black Lives Matter far beyond what their readers’ numbers would merit.

Stories about Rand Paul, Mitt Romney, Glenn Beck and other right-wing figures were being minimized or ignored while reports about transgender bathrooms, gun control and anti-Trump protests were being promulgated. Because of Facebook’s popularity, it’s actually arguable that the website’s Trending Topics tab might be the most viewed section of the Internet.

In a public letter to Zuckerberg, Senator Thune, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, wrote, “Social networks such as Facebook are an increasingly important source of news for many Americans and people around the world. If Facebook presents its Trending Topics section as the result of a neutral, objective algorithm but is, in fact, subjective, [then] Facebook’s assertion that it maintains ‘a platform for people and perspectives from across the political spectrum’ misleads the public.”

Thune went on to request a quantification of “all news stories removed from or injected into the Trending Topics section” since January 2014.

In the meantime, the Republican National Committee has announced an online petition for people to voice their support for more conservative topics. Tech editor of Breitbart News Milo Yiannopoulos has challenged Zuckerburg to hold a one-on-one interview regarding the matter to be broadcast on a Facebook live stream.

And while these events have been ongoing, major Facebook shareholder and tech innovator Peter Thiel has stated he will be a delegate for GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump.

For its part, Facebook initially denied the Gizmodo allegations through its vice president of Search, Tom Stocky. “Facebook does not allow or advise our reviewers to systematically discriminate against sources of any ideological origin, and we’ve designed our tools to make that technically not feasible,” he stated.

“At the same time, our reviewers’ actions are logged and reviewed, and violating our guidelines is a fireable offense.” However, it has since come out that Stocky, among other Facebook employees, was a maximum donor to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. In fact, the Clinton campaign has revealed that it’s had more contributions from Facebook employees than any other presidential candidate.

Mark Zuckerburg has vowed that the company would be launching a “full investigation” into Gizmodo’s claims and that he took such reports “very seriously.”

In a Facebook post, Zuckerburg said he wants to invite “people from across the political spectrum,” including “leading conservatives,” to have a conversation with him about “what Facebook stands for and how we can be sure our platform stays as open as possible.”

Zuckerburg released the guidelines its Trending Topics editors (who at one time numbered as few as 12) use and said the company has “rigorous guidelines” that “do not permit the prioritization of one viewpoint over another or the suppression of political perspectives”.

The guidelines resemble a typical mainstream media’s news organization’s style guide and suggest 10 news sources from which to draw content, including conservative outlets The Wall Street Journal and Fox News. It was disclosed that individual editors at least at one point had the power to “blacklist” stories.

It has long been argued that the mainstream media in America has a liberal bias, but the control over the news now wielded by the Internet and social media sites has put Silicon Valley in charge of what was previously administered by a handful of newspaper editors who consulted with numerous sources on a daily basis.

Now, automated algorithms and keywords can be used to flag posts and articles, and less human curatorial effort is required. Liberal and progressive sources have argued that under free-speech laws, Facebook and any other companies are free to promote whatever content they wish to. Such sources may be happy to make these arguments when content they’re passionate about is shared widely. However, if the situation were reversed, it’s likely that these same voices would be the first to cry about unfair treatment.

Vince Coglianese, editor of conservative news website The Daily Caller believes that Facebook needs to be more transparent about its processes. He says that “It’s scary to think Facebook’s intentionally isolating vast swaths of the country… The middle man matters in news consumption.”

Admittedly, not all “trending news” is positive or would be in the best interest of a social media site to promote. Trivial, gory or untrue content might very well dominate if no humans were involved at all in story curation. Facebook in the past had received criticism for broadcasting stories about Ice Bucket Challenge videos, for instance, over those about riots.

The company faced claims that Twitter was more of a source of hard news than Facebook, which was more “fluffy.” The website Reddit is an example of a more truly democratic representation of shared content, and Facebook’s advertisers likely do not want the site to head in that direction.

In some ways, Facebook is caught between a rock and a hard place. If conservative critics are vocal enough, it’s likely the site will try to pin the blame on automated methods rather than human error. But at the end of the day, even automation has to be programmed by human coders. It’s definitely possible to trace a bias back to managers or officers with enough research.

As long as the heat is kept up on Facebook, there may be a reversal of recent censorship trends. In the future, however, it may take government regulation to put the political viewpoint meter roughly back in the center position where it belongs.


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