It’s a double-whammy for Facebook this afternoon. After Gizmodo this morning published interviews with former contractors who claim they and others would routinely suppress both conservative news stories and stories critical of Facebook from trending, guess what’s trending on Facebook?
"What censorship?" pic.twitter.com/wn72Twxdnd
— Charlie Spiering (@charliespiering) May 9, 2016
What do you know? Gizmodo’s post is among the top trends on Facebook, right behind stories about House Speaker Paul Ryan and President George W. Bush.
https://twitter.com/kjon/status/729739653746708480
Gizmodo, whose corporate parent is Gawker Media, is no conservative site, but its talk with Facebook “news curators” who claim they were instructed to juice the lagging popularity of certain stories by “injecting” them into the trending news module has resonated with readers.
Former Facebook workers: "We routinely suppressed conservative news." https://t.co/vi2MkJ82zw pic.twitter.com/WljGgewhZO
— Gizmodo (@Gizmodo) May 9, 2016
Those who spoke with Gizmo, including one rare specimen — a conservative journalist who was hired by Facebook — asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, and seemed to agree that whether news of interest to conservatives were to slip through depended on who was tweaking the algorithm results that shift.
“Facebook got a lot of pressure about not having a trending topic for Black Lives Matter,” one former 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’.”
https://twitter.com/JTP_Halifax/status/729705435276685312
https://twitter.com/DesScorp/status/729685217959673856
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@Gizmodo no shit
— Tyler Wallace (@teewallace) May 9, 2016
https://twitter.com/ozbrandon95/status/729731897992032256
Gizmo updated its post Monday afternoon, adding that although Facebook didn’t respond to its calls during the writing of the post, Facebook issued a statement to other sites like BuzzFeed and TechCrunch insisting that its guidelines prohibit political bias.
Update: Facebook says guidelines "do not permit the suppression of political perspectives." https://t.co/49UmqvRXbk pic.twitter.com/zzf3xHMdly
— Gizmodo (@Gizmodo) May 9, 2016
Those might be the guidelines, but an unbiased news feed would depend on the curators, who 1) are given the power to “inject” underperforming stories into the list of legitimately popular trends and 2) would presumably like to keep their jobs, following those guidelines.
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