Evidence has emerged that social media giant Facebook is effectively censoring right-wing news and websites.
A report on Facebook’s “news curators,” featured on the tech blog Gizmodo, revealed that hired contractors — and not a computer algorithm — are in fact in charge of what is displayed in the “trending news” section of the Facebook website.
“We choose what’s trending,” said one former curator. “There was no real standard for measuring what qualified as news and what didn’t. It was up to the news curator to decide.”
These “curators” would “regularly avoid sites like World Star Hip Hop, The Blaze, and Breitbart,” the report said.
While they were reportedly never explicitly ordered to do so, the report makes clear they did not need to be, as they were “told to select articles from a list of preferred media outlets that included sites like The New York Times, Time, [and] Variety” — all publications with a definite left-wing bias.
Facebook’s disdain for conservative and right-wing politics has surfaced before. In Europe, Facebook launched an initiative with the German Ministry of Justice to censor anti-immigrant and populist speech on Facebook in Germany.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is a well-known supporter of left-wing and liberal causes. He is a vocal proponent of more H-1B visas, and in an April 2015 speech took a thinly veiled shot at GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump’s proposed immigration policies.
The Gizmodo report notes that if “an editorial team is deliberating over trending topics … Facebook risks losing its image as a non-partisan player in the media industry.” It seems clear it was never a non-partisan player to begin with.
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